IU, Harmony Center to improve education

IU's School of Education is teaming up with Harmony Education Center to help preschool through 12th grade students across America achieve a better education.\n"This (collaboration) is the clearinghouse for school reform," said School of Education Dean Geraldo M. Gonzalez. "It provides new and different training for initiating innovative processes."\nThe purpose of the program is to enable hundreds of school systems across the nation to prepare students for college or technology-intensive jobs that provide on-the-site training with at least a high school education, he said.\n"Working with IU will be our vehicle to spreading this to all of the school districts in the state," said Harmony Education Center Executive Director Steve Boncheck. \nPart of the collaboration includes professional development, where teachers are educated by coaches on how to carry out processes that will improve student achievement. \nDaniel Baron, director of National Programs at the Harmony school, is also a national facilitator who instructs some of the more than 15,000 coaches across the nation. \n"I train educators to coach their peers in collaborative, working and democratic learning communities," Baron said. "National facilitators provide a rich repertoire of practices for adult learning in the service of children."\nAn important part of professional development is the Critical Friends Group.\n"This is basically like a seminar where the teachers and administrators of a school district sit down and think about critical issues together," said Jesse Goodman, professor of education and director of Harmony's Institute for Research.\nThe Institute for Research explores two avenues of education, Baron said. They closely examine their own programs and progresses, but also study progressive education in the United States and have been published in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Education Review.\nThe Harmony Education Center, 909 E. Second St., is a national school reform organization based in Bloomington. The center teaches classes, but is also the center for the national school reform education organization.\nThe Harmony Education Center has four components -- the preschool-12 progressive school originated in 1974, the Institute for Research founded in 1990, Rhino's Youth Center founded in 1992 and the National School Reform Faculty, which relocated from Brown University in June 2000. Progressive education is the focus of the Harmony Education Center by means of incorporating education that is not offered in a traditional public or private school system.\n"We give what we think of as the 'whole education,'" Boncheck said. "We foster a child's intellectual, social and emotional needs as well as an ecological stewardship."\n-- Contact staff writer Benjames Derrick at bderrick@indiana.edu.