You have reached a safe harbor – The North Star Community of Practice. We hope you will join this community – a group of people who believes in the potential of EVERY learner – and is dedicated to exploring creative ways to nurture and protect that spark.

Consider this your virtual oasis to recharge and refresh yourself on the Journey. Come connect with other progressive educators and caregivers who understand the value of “learner-centric” education. Enjoy the transformational power of storytelling, media and technology. In this rush-rush, test-centric world, we need to stay together, keep inspired, and push this mission forward.

Join in the conversation – and please stay tuned. We will be building out resources to keep us connected, to keep the conversations going, to share practical tools/stories/media, and hear about your successes and challenges. Together we will affect change in classrooms and homes around the world.

All best on the Journey,
Paul

Welcome, and in many cases, welcome back to the North Star Community. It is our sincere hope that all of our guests share the vision for this community, and get involved to help shape and grow the community and the vision going forward. To this end, I thought I’d share our approach and goals for this new version of the North Star Community.

Open Ended ‘Discussion’ Content. As you may have noticed, we have reconstructed the site using a customized “blog” format (Wordpress, for those interested). Most of the content of the site will be in the traditional ‘post’ format, where an author can create some original content and put it up for others to read, and ‘discuss’ through the comments.
Committed, Engaged Members. The community is open, anyone can visit the site without logging in. But to participate at any level (and we hope you will!) visitors must register and log in. Anyone can register, and anyone can add comments to any discussion. Your first comment will be ‘moderated’ (to be sure you are not a spam-bot), and after that your comments will appear immediately on the site. Active participants in conversations can themselves begin to post original discussions, as ‘authors’ of posts. If you’d like to post original content, please just contact us at our ‘info@’ inbox for this site. Who knows, submit enough comments and we may approach you!

Thoughtful, ‘Organic’ Growth. As the site grows we will contstantly evaluate the functionality we need, and the pieces we will add. We’ll create new categories as needed. We’ll post media as we develop/find/receive it. We invite you, either using the comments section of this very post, through email to our info@ account, or by becoming an author and posting in this category, to tell us what you’d like to see.

Thanks everyone, for being a part of our community.

-Doug and the North Star Community Development Team