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The Power of Their Ideas At CPE, small class sizes, knowing the students and their families over several years, opportunities for casual conversation across age divides and around many topics, rules and regulations that largely assumed young and old have similar needs and rights (to use the bathroom and the telephone, to a place to talk privately, to good and bad days, to opportunities for telling "my side" of the story) - all these were necessary backdrops to mutual respect. We tried to build into the school day ways to support qualities we valued. Teachers, if they were to extend respect to their students, needed to be instrumental in decisions about curriculum and assessment. They had to be involved in hiring their colleagues and providing ongoing support to them. they were, in short, accountable for the work of the entire school. Which coworker would be next door or across the hall, which specialist a teacher would be dealing with, when lunch was served - the collective solutions to these daily problems laid the groundwork for interesting, reflective, and caring classrooms. Making this kind of sharing possible also meant that we had to make time for consultation and the exchange of information upon which we make sound decisions. It meant we needed more than the traditional once-a-month mandated after-school "principal's conference" (generally devoted to reading memos to be sure that all directives have been "heard"). Reflectiveness required a different order of time. We learned that it takes months, even years, to see some ideas take shape. Above all, we recognized that caring for others is very hard to do if you don't see yourself as capable of being helpful to them. There is a terrible and seemingly pointless pain in powerless caring, and it erodes the capacity for affection. To hear a story and be faced with either ignoring it or being a martyr to everyone else's woes are the usual choices available. A school that is a community has other possibilities. When a former elementary school student called us years later, homeless and scared, between our dauntless social worker, Susan Bolitzer, our collective knowledge of the details of the student's life, and the organizational flexibility to mobilize resources and follow up on details, we not only found him a home, but located siblings lost to him in his infancy, whose whereabouts he had never known. At CPE we needed time and again to discover the ways to effectively care - to become better teachers. Part of it depended on having sufficient power. We kept extensive notes and records of children's work, continuously experimenting with better ways to keep and use such information. We met to work out ways to sharpen our observational skill at understanding children's learning modes and preferences as individuals - what engaged them most deeply, how they responded to criticism best. In opening ourselves up to our colleagues and to outsiders, we had also to learn to deal with how we took criticism and to pay heed to our own ways of learning. We worked together to better organize curriculum as well as to increase our knowledge about the subjects that our students were studying. We exchanged articles and books we liked, and we attended all manner of courses and institutes that suited our interest and needs. Being seen as intellectually curious people, modeling what a mathematician, historian, or scientist does, are rock-bottom necessities if kids are to catch on to what we're about. Our desire to teach, after all, needs to be connected always to our enthusiasm and respect to what we're teaching about. The power of their ideas tells the story of Central Park East School system. It talks about the struggles and overwhelming success of the teachers and the students in the system. The CPE system, to me, proves that looking at a problem from a different perspective might be the best way to fix what seems to be a helpless situation and emphasizes the power of giving power to individuals. An inspiring and educational book if you're interested in education.

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