was founded in 1916 as the Bureau of Educational Experiments. Our founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, convinced that public schools were not serving children well, set out, with a group of like-minded colleagues, to discover the environments in which children grow and learn to their full potential, and to educate teachers and others to create these environments. From those small beginnings as an experimental nursery school staffed by teachers, psychologists, and researchers, Bank Street grew over the years, adding programs and projects, more students, both adults and children, creating materials for and about children in many media, and influencing the design and implementation of such national educational programs as Head Start and Follow Through.
Bank Street College supports the entire spectrum of education, supporting Lucy Sprague Mitchell's mission to "keep one ever a learner." To learn more about our offerings in a specific area, click on any stage of the continuum.
- Enabling Children to Thrive Emotionally and Academically
The Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice focuses on the social and emotional development of children, and how life experiences can affect that development and the child's learning potential. The Center helps schools build on the connection between emotional well being and learning by facilitating emotionally responsive school routines, curriculum that reflects group issues, and responsive adult-child interactions.
- A Public School Collaboration: Midtown West
A professional development collaboration between Bank Street and Community School District Two in Manhattan began in 1989 with a learning center for preschoolers at Midtown West School on West Forty-Eighth Street. By 1995, this had expanded to ten classrooms, from pre-K to sixth grade, serving about 270 children. Today, this school is a working public school model of the approach to learning used in Bank Street's School for Children, which emphasizes experiential and interactive learning.
- The New York Times: the News as Curriculum
In the 2002-03 school year, the Division of Continuing Education entered into a collaboration with The New York Times to train staff developers from New York, Florida, Texas, and Colorado to create child-centered curriculum pieces that used The New York Times Curriculum Guides and lesson plans as a primary resource. The next year, Bank Street staff developers began training some fifty-four classroom teachers and literacy coaches from New York City, and have now expanded their efforts to the tri-state area. The team of staff developers also uses as an additional resource the lesson plans offered on The New York Times Learning Network, which are created daily in collaboration with Bank Street's Publications & Media Group.
- Learning in the Natural World
The Tiorati Workshop for Environmental Learning, a collaborative venture of Bank Street College and the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, seeks to strengthen environmental science education in diverse and high-needs urban schools. What distinguishes Tiorati from other environmental education programs is its emphasis on integrating environmental science methods and concepts across the curriculum. The Tiorati model helps teachers establish a classroom curriculum that connects what children read with what they investigate in science, learn in mathematics, and study in social studies. This integrated approach fosters the development of both knowledge and skills and helps children learn to relate to the natural world around them, including their local neighborhoods and parks.
- Bank Street in Children's Hospitals
Bank Street's recently accredited Child Life Master's Program, now in its fourth year, prepares students to work in developmentally appropriate ways with children in hospital and community healthcare settings. Although the profession dates from the 1920'˙≠s, the first formal training program with specific educational requirements was established in 1955 at Cleveland City Hospital. In Bank Street's program, students develop the skills to work with children and their families living with the realities of chronic or terminal illness, surgery, trauma, injury, and disability. They learn how to prepare children for medical procedures, minimize stress and anxiety for them and their families, and provide these children with normal life experiences and educational input that promote their optimal growth and development.
- Alaska at Bank Street
During the 2004-2005 school year, students in the Bank Street School for Children collaborated with students living in the tiny village of Kwethluk, Alaska, and together they investigated geography and culture in each location, exchanging, processing, and finalizing their joint study through a web-based hub. With funding from the National Geographic Society Foundation, they created a series of interactive, multimedia mapping projects that integrated the cultural information and geographic understanding they developed together. The mapping projects are posted on the web and shared within and between both communities. In June 2005, a group of Kwethluk children came to Bank Street to meet the New York City children they had come to know well over the course of the year. The Kwethluk children, who came from a very remote village, were dazzled by such unfamiliar city delights as a ride on the subway, a visit to Coney Island, and a trip to the Statue of Liberty.
- Attuning Teachers to Children's Learning Differences
The Urban Schools Attuned (USA) project was a collaboration between Bank Street and All Kinds of Minds (AKOM). USA instructed teachers how to recognize, understand, and work with children's learning differences, enabling them to effectively teach a broad range of students in both public and private schools. Bank Street's USA actually served as a national model for the AKOM training sites that were set up across the country, and executive personnel were sent to Bank Street to observe its work. In 2003, AKOM, USA's umbrella organization, entered into a five-year contract with the NYC Department of Education to train more than 20,000 public school teachers.
Today, Bank Street reading specialists and staff developers carry out similar professional development work in other projects, in particular with the new Bank Street Partnership for Quality, a collaboration between Bank Street and Region 9 that aims to transform high-needs schools in the South Bronx and East Harlem into very successful learning environments.
- Enriching Afterschool Programs
The Professional Development for After School Program has provided professional development in the arts and literacy for afterschool educators and directors of afterschool programs throughout New York City since 2000. The program focuses on enriching and expanding participants' repertoire of creative curriculum and instructional strategies for children in grades K-12. In addition, the program provides direct services to children and youth through its own arts-based afterschool program, the Queens Cultural Partnership.
- Studying Objects in Motion
With funding from the Toshiba America Foundation, the School for Children will conduct a comprehensive study of the nature of the motion of objects, including both steady motion and the motion of objects as they are acted on by gravity. Key to this study will be equipment that will allow students in the seventh and eighth grades to record the motion of objects in ways that enable them to analyze that motion mathematically. The analysis of motion that students do in middle school algebra courses, usually based on graphs, gains both substance and depth of understanding when based on direct observations and recording of motion in lab experiences.
- Developing Support for Kith and Kin Caretakers
Federal welfare reform legislation in 1996 required women with children to work in exchange for benefits. This created a tremendous new demand for childcare, and most of these women turned to kith and kin: friends, neighbors, and relatives, who are exempt from regulation. Today, half of all children nationally are in kith and kin care, making it an important issue for state and federal policy makers.
Bank Street's Institute for a Child Care Continuum (ICCC) undertook a series of research initiatives on caregivers in various neighborhoods, and then created successful support groups for them based on their needs and challenges. Today, the Institute offers three primary services: research and evaluation; technical assistance for organizations seeking to develop programs in early childhood, family support, and parent education; and staff development for agencies and individuals who work with young children and their families.
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Graduate School, which offers intensive, individualized master's degree programs every year to 1,000 aspiring teachers and school leaders, conducts action-oriented research designed to improve teaching and learning, and works with public schools in New York City and in other cities.
a School for Children and Family Center, which, together, offer unparalleled care and education to nearly 500 children.
a Division of Continuing Education, which conducts much of the College's extensive outreach work in a wide variety of schools and communities.
a Publications and Media Group, which creates innovative materials for and about children in many forms, including books, CD-ROMs, television, and websites.
