CES Principles

CES Ten Common Principles

1. Help students "learn to use their minds well."
2. Emphasize depth over breadth.
3. Apply goals to all students.
4. Personalize teaching and learning.
5. Embrace the metaphor "student as worker."
6. Require students to demonstrate mastery through exhibition.
7. Stress unanxiouis expectation, trust and decency.
8. Consider teachers as generalists with a commitment to the entire school.
9. Develop budgets that reflect CES priorities.
10. Model democratic and equitable practices.

CES Eight Organizational Principles

1. CES should be a learning community, modeling the practices it expects of schools. Inquiry should inform the practices of the organization as well as the practices of schools and of adults and young people within them.
2. CES, its centers and member schools, should commit themselves to documentation of change efforts, demonstration of student achievement, using the most effective combination of objective, subjective and performance-based data, and public sharing of all that has been learned.
3. Just as students differ one from another, so do teachers, schools and communities; therefore, CES, its centers and member schools, should value local wisdom and have the flexibility to respond to their local contexts.
4. The whole school, including parents, should be the fundamental unit of change.
5. Collaboration and critical friendship should be central to all levels of CES work, whether in classrooms or among colleagues and community members to fully explore and thoughtfully utilize the enormous potential of a wide range of technologies to advance this goal.
6. CES should maintain a voice in the national discourse about educational reform and should seek alliances with like-minded organizations. Decisions about the nature and extent of such alliances should be made as close as possible to the school and community.
7. CES, its centers and member schools, should model democratic practices and should deliberately and explicitly address challenges of equity in relation to race, class and gender.
8. Since they have direct bearing on intellectual, interpersonal and organizational processes, CES work at all levels should be of a size and scale to allow for personalization.