Big Picture Main Text Hello, this is AJ. Welcome to the next lesson. This one is called "The Big Picture." And it comes again from a book called The Big Picture. And The Big Picture is by a man named Dennis Littky. Now Littky is spelled L-i-t-t-k-y, Dennis Littky. The name of the book is The Big Picture. I love this book. This is a book about education and Mr. Littky is an extremely interesting guy. He is just a fantastic teacher, a fantastic educator. Mr. Littky used to be a teacher and then he became a principal of a middle school. Actually I think he started as a principal of an elementary school and then later a middle school, public school, just a normal public government school. Well, he created an incredible school at his first school, just an amazing school. There were articles written about his school. It just became so famous because this school had a lot of low income students, students from poor families. So this was not in some rich neighborhood with a lot of money. And before Mr. Littky became the principal, the school was having a lot of problems. But he came in and he changed everything. He changed the teachers. He hired only passionate, excited, energetic teachers, but not only that. He changed the whole system. He stopped focusing on testing. He stopped focusing on grades. He focused on the students as human beings. He wanted his students to grow as people. Not just to memorize a bunch of facts, but to really learn how to think. And even more importantly how to use their thinking and use their knowledge. So for example, most of his classes were project-based. In other words, the students did not study textbooks and take tests, no, no, no. What they did is they created a project. And each project was individual. Each student chose a project or projects based on their own interests. And of course the teachers helped to guide these projects and structure them. So for example, if one child really loved dinosaurs they would create a project about dinosaurs. The teachers, the math teachers, the science teachers, etc., the English teachers, would help that student learn math, learn science, learn English, learn history, learn everything, all focused on dinosaurs because this kid loved dinosaurs. So they would use dinosaurs to teach math, for example. Maybe they had to learn how to calculate the size of a dinosaur's bones or something. I don't know exactly how they did it, but they used the students' individual passions to teach. And the students had to do these incredibly, amazing, huge, difficult projects. These were not easy. They were really tough. But the kids were very passionate about what they were doing. And another thing that Dennis Littky did, he involved the community. His school had mentors, advisors, helpers, from the community...parents, especially parents, but also experts. So for example, if a kid really loved dinosaurs or maybe a whole class was really interested in dinosaurs, they brought experts from museums, from universities to www.EffortlessEnglishClub.com