charlie+rathbone

Hi. Personal page. Hmmmmm. Let's see. Feel free to ask any questions once you get reading this.

Born in NYC (8-7-42). Moved to [|Hamilton], New York which is where I grew up. Dad came home one day when I was four years old and told Mom he'd sold the house. She didn't know it was for sale. Interesting.

Small high school. College community in farming country. I grew up with a socio-economically diverse group of kids. All of us were white and with the exception of Sally and Susan, Christian. Every year Black migrant farm workers would come through following the harvest - peas, beans, some potatoes. They stayed in wretched hovels. Some of their kids came to school with us in September for about three weeks. That was really my first face to face experience with people noticeably different from me. That and on a few trips to NYC to see my Mom's mom. My brother still lives in Hamilton. Mom and Dad are gone.

Went to the University of Rochester for my undergraduate years. Majored in Psych., minored in American History, played football, dropped my music although I did one stint in my freshman year in an all male musical comedy group. Did graduate work in Urban Education at Syracuse, taught in the Syracuse schools in the late 1960s and earned a doctorate in teacher education at SU in 1970, the year I came to UVM. It was at Syacuse that I finally developed a social consciousness. I think maybe it was because I began to be able to articulate what it meant. I'd "felt" it for years before, ever since the bus boycott, but I couldn't quite put it all into words. My family was not known for conversation whatsoever so I didn't grow up in a way that helped me to feel the thrill of verbal jousting. If you jousted in my family, you were rude and out of line. People meant well, but it clearly was a different time and place.

I never thought I'd be at UVM for what turned out to be a pretty great run. My most recent interest has been this fascination with [|Complex Instruction], a way of structuring groupwork situations in classrooms that really work. It turns out to do this well, you have to work hard at manipulating the social and academic structures in the classroom so the kids who usually sit on the sidelines get their chance to participate and be academically recognized for their participation. The "trick" with CI is to get the other kids in a group to want to know more about what the quieter kids have to offer. Once that happens, conversations change, academic content goes deeper, and the learning curves rise for everyone. It takes some serious design work to make it happen but CI is a very powerful intervention. Every teacher should know how to make cooperative learning work because it is such a powerful strategy noted as producing "successful engagement" by almost every marginalized group within the boundaries of our public school classrooms.

My fundmental interest in neuroscience as it relates to how the brain learns comes from my core belief that 1) all children are learners, and 2) we all learn in the same way when it comes to the learning process. We all have different life experience so the content of the learning process differs from person to person but process wise, we are pretty much all in the same bag. I think this is a powerful statement about the commonality of human kind.

I am married to Ann. Altogether, we have four children including two children from my first marriage,. We're a blended family, our younger children being adopted and bi-racial...well, actually multi-racial. We have four grandchildren, three in Boston and one in our own home along with her Mom. Life is full, to say the least! Oh, we also have Kuma, a Golden Retriever / Poodle mix.



Here are my Responses to E mailed questions.

[|Link to George Luka's great magazine!]

c11 [[file:learning brain text.doc]]..big ideas and supporting paragaphs
[|webspiration page]

[|video] from alas media, llc

Presentation from NECC 2009 on Leadership in the Digital Age...from wil richardson's tinkering towards transformation blog

media type="custom" key="4126347"

Pictures worth a 1000 words...
A Visual Heuristic That Defines Good Learning