Reconstructed Classrooms: Creating Communities out of Classrooms

"Over the last five years Philadelphia has become known as one of the cities that has experimented the most with education. After five years one of the things that was concluded was reconstructed schools outperformed corporate sponsored schools and charter schools.

"These are schools that remain public but in one way or the other became restsructured. It has only been recently that this concept has been talked about publicly but when I first heard it my ears stood up because the concept of Bridging Worlds has been based on restructuring classroms to make them much more productive places for children to learn and teachers to teach."
-- Steve Satell, Founder of Bridging Worlds

Our model has been based on low overhead because instead of employing staff we have created partnerships across the city that aid us in restructuring classrooms, connecting students to the outside world and creating excitement inside the clasroom. These come in the forms of mentors mostly successful people in all the fields that had grown up in the community. We also provide speakers from around the world to give students exposure to different cultures and perspectives.

At the heart of our intervention to help schools create communities out of classrooms is our critical thinking program. Here we take the lead in the classroom for three weeks and begin to create relationships with teachers and parents. With teachers this is the beginning of a partnership. We bridge the gap between parents and teachers by calling parents every night and visiting homes. Both teachers an parents are under great pressure. We help to take the pressure off both.

Our program beings with a dramatic one man play that relates to the trauma many of the students have experienced in their life. Then students are taken through the process of story writing by learning the tools writers use to write stories: theme, point of view, character, irony... Students must read eight stories and take a quiz and a test with in a week and half on stories way above their grade level. Then they write a five page story that we put into a book. The program is concluded when a professional writer comes in and reads the sudents stories. Bridging Worlds continues to aid parents throughout the rest of the year.

Before you move on to the rest of our site imagine the most at risk group of ninth grade students who are both withdrawn, defiant and see little hope for their future transformed into enthusiastic young people who value education and each other. Bridging Worlds has done this time after time in classroom after classroom.