Qualities Needed for Learning: What Schools Can Do

Qualities Needed for Learning: What Schools Can Do

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The 2012 Chicago School Policy Forum Series, Sweating the Soft Stuff: Qualities Needed for Learning and How to Nurture Them, will conclude with a look at “What Schools Can Do.” Camille Farrington, will share highlights of a recent Consortium on Chicago School Research report that challenges the notion hard work and effort are fixed character traits of individual students. Rather, the researchrs found these traits can be fostered—or repressed—through instructional and contextual factors in the classroom. 

Farrington also will offer fresh insights into why grades are far better predictors than test scores of whether a student will graduate from high school or college. A panel of on-the-ground educators will talk about what they are doing to nurture the required qualities. 

The annual series is co-sponsored by Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI) and Catalyst Chicago, a publication of Community Renewal Society. Camille Farrington is lead author of Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners, a new report from the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. Farrington is a research associate at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (SSA).

Respondents at this event are: Mary Ann Pitcher, co-director, Network for College Success, a partnership between the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and the Chicago Public Schools that promotes whole-school improvement; Elizabeth Dozier, principal, Fenger High School, a turn-around school in the Roseland neighborhood; Sean Stalling, chief of schools, South Side Network, Chicago Public Schools, and the former principal of Manley High School.  

To register for this event and pay online, follow this link. You may also download a form to pay by mail or fax.