Fox Chapel Area School District: Striving for Top Performance in Public Education

Introduction

The chosen district is the Fox Chapel Area School District whose mission is to maximize the learning of students, their development as well as achievement. The primary aim of the school is always to strive to become among the top performing public schools in the nation. Therefore, in addressing her complex learning situations of today's students through the combination of experimentation with the emerging technologies, Fox Chapel established a strategic plan which would assist it in achieving its goal. Moreover, openly licensed educational resources (OER) was utilized by the plan which allowed the teachers to remix, revise, and redistribute educational resources without any copyright law being violated (Office of Educational Technology, 2018). The school opted to begin by only using the OER as supplemental materials so that the faculty could be made simpler into the selected and emerging idea. Nevertheless, at first, the OER was underused or used less than expected because there were other priorities which took precedence. However, as time progressed, the strategy gave teachers the period to explore the implementation and notion of OER in their classes which prepared them for the Go Open Initiative (Office of Educational Technology, 2018).

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The pursuit of OER for Fox Chapel was, therefore, rejuvenated when the Go Open Initiative started. The school deployed post-class openly licensed resources that were easily updatable which reinforced and summarized the previously taught content as well as following students annually as they engage and interact with new materials. Also, Fox Chapel's implementation of the openly licensed resources to the pre and post-classes is to encourage the students to engage with new concepts earlier and look ahead (Office of Educational Technology, 2018). Moreover, the OER materials for the pre and post-classes enable the teachers to easily customize and align their content among one another to attempt providing their students with the best education. The OER has also granted Fox Chapel to implement their ideas for novels in an effective, centralized, and affordable manner (Office of Educational Technology, 2018). Thus, with a well-curated OER, the school might achieve its vision by providing its staff with the freedom to establish a personalized curriculum as well as providing students will different rich opportunities.

Additionally, Fox Chapel is already supported by the theory of constructivism, which is the idea where people should be responsible in creating their understanding of the earth and using their previous experiences to apply their knowledge, through linking the acquired new information to their past experiences. According to the theory, a person should use his or her experiences and new information to create their understanding, which Fox Chapel has always embraced (Schunk, 2012). Also, the theory asserts three primary themes including social interaction that plays as the major role in the cognitive development process as social learning often precedes development. The other is the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) which refers to any person who has a higher ability level or a better understanding than the learner, concerning a specific concept, process, or task. Lastly, the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) explains the distance between the ability of the learner to perform a particular task with peer collaboration or adult guidance and the learner's ability to solve the depicted problem independently (Schunk, 2012).

Conclusion

The positive change that the experimentation caused is better development of communication and social skills between teachers and students. Thus, the students and teachers should learn how to articulate clearly their concepts and ideas and collaborate on tasks effectively through sharing the burden of group projects. They can then exchange their ideas and negotiate with each other as well as evaluating their contributions in a socially acceptable way. The concept is essential to their success in the real world as they will often be exposed to numerous different experiences where they will have to navigate among the ideas of other people.

References

Office of Educational Technology. (2018). Fox Chapel Area School District: From Bottom Up. Suburban community Type. Retrieved from https://tech.ed.gov/stories/foxchapel/

Schunk, D. H. (2012). Learning theories an educational perspective sixth edition. Pearson. Retrieved from http://repository.umpwr.ac.id:8080/bitstream/handle/123456789/96/[Dale_H._Schunk]_Learning_Theories_An_Educational..pdf?sequence=1