What is it that makes the culminating year in a student’s high school career really memorable? College Application Frenzy? The Anxiety That Comes With Making Choices That May Just Determine Your Entire Future? Enervating Senior Slump?

It’s the fortunate student who can come up with a very different, and very positive, answer. For the past 25 years, students in a variety of high schools over the entire country have been able to spend the last part of their senior year focusing on something that truly engages them, thanks to the WISE program. Their stories paint a very different picture from that depressing scenario so often depicted as the standard senior experience.

One such student was Kia Darling-Hammond whose mother, Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, knows a thing or two about education (see Linda’s impressive educational credentials at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Darling-Hammond). Kia’s experience in WISE introduced her and her mother to WISE and made them vocal proponents for the program. Five years ago, as WISE celebrated its 20^th anniversary, they made the following video detailing Kia’s senior experience, thanks to WISE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S8kZ7QKE_k.

Or you can skip the video and see their list of the Top 10 Reasons Why WISE is So Wise, excerpted from the same video,  below.

Their comments are as timeless and priceless today, the 25^th year anniversary of WISE Services, as they were five years ago.

LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND’S TOP TEN LIST –– “WHY WISE IS SO WISE”

…from the video shoutout by Linda Darling-Hammond and her daughter Kia {New Rochelle HS WISE, Class of 1994}, at the 20th Anniversary Celebration of the founding of WISE Services   (full video on www.wiseservices.org)

“WISE is really a very WISE way to support education.”

1. The WISE program is a model for what the learning experience should be in schools -is authentic, it’s in­ spiring, it’s driven by students’ own interests and passions and their own desire to learn.
2. WISE is really what college and career-ready standards are supposed to be about; what 21st-century skills are supposed to be It’s about learning to learn, it’s about critical thinking, it’s about problem solving. It is those things that students need to have in order to be successful throughout their lives.
3. WISE is what helps students develop an understanding of how to persevere on a problem, how to learn to learn, how to find resources, how to do those things that they will have to do over and over again throughout
4. WISE teaches students to have their own standards, to actually self-assess and figure out whether they are achieving their own And that’s the kind of motivation that everyone needs to achieve at high levels in any activity or walk of life throughout their entire learning career.
5. WISE teaches everyone who is involved -the people who are mentoring are learning; the people who are evaluating the project are learning; clearly, the student who is doing it is We learn most deeply those things we have to teach. And WISE puts students in the role of being teachers.
6. WISE transforms Many students say: “I didn’t know I could do that. I’m a different person at the end of this experience than I was before.”
7. WISE transforms Because educators say: “Wow! I didn’t know that students could do that. I didn’t know we, as educators, could do this. I didn’t know school could be like this .” And it has a transformative effect on what happens in schools after they have initiated this process for their students. People start to ask: “What if other parts of school could be like this?”
8. WISE helps schools to connect to each other because of the WISE network, and to learn from each And it creates a bigger transformative influence in the field of education .
9. WISE connects students and schools to their
10. WISE is so wise because of Vic Leviatin who has made it his passion to help students bring their passions to the fore and to make that become the center of the educational WISE is what it is today because of his efforts and those of all of you who are watching this and who are celebrating WISE’s 20th Anniversary.

September 22, 2011