Directed by Greg Whiteley | USA | 2015 | Documentary | 90 mins
Sponsor: Lorna-Kay Peal
Film Source: One Potato Productions
Post-screening panel discussion with Executive Producer Ted Dintersmith
Over 120 years ago, the American educational system was designed based on industrial models of organizational structure rather than educational principles. Most Likely to Succeed makes a passionate case for the urgent need of reform. Providing a clear and concise look at the history of education in the country, the documentary primarily focuses on possible solutions, featuring an array of insightful interviews with teachers, specialists, and policy-makers as well as an insider’s look at the efforts of one particular Californian high school that has completely revised its structure and curriculum to incorporate more modern educational models and philosophies. Greg Whiteley’s engaging, impassioned yet personal documentary is sure to inspire much needed reflection and discussion about the way forward for today’s educators and schools.
The panelists:
Ted Dintersmith (Executive Producer)
After a twenty-five year career in venture capital, Ted Dintersmith is now focused on issues at the intersection of innovation and education. He is actively involved with a number of initiatives that seek to deliver vastly improved learning experiences to people around the globe. He is particularly interested in the role of film in effecting social change.
Lindsey Cox (Partnership for Change)
Lindsey Cox is the project manager for the Partnership for Change working in the Burlington and Winooski School districts. She holds her undergraduate degree in Secondary Education from UVM and received her master’s in International Education from The SIT Graduate Institute. She began her professional career at Bellow’s Free Academy – St. Albans, where she taught English and led students on educational excursions to Nicaragua. Lindsey also worked with The Governor’s Institute of Vermont in the Asian Studies program and took high school students to China. Before joining the Partnership, she managed Yogani Studios, a yoga and wellness studio in Tampa, FL. When not working to support educational change in Vermont you can find her biking, skiing, practicing yoga or brewing kombucha.
Mark Cline-Lucey (Vermont Commons School)
Mark Cline Lucey has been teaching high school Social Studies for sixteen years, the last eleven of them at Vermont Commons School where he has had the support and autonomy to try, fail, try again . . . and again. Mark believes that he has the most exciting, dynamic, challenging job in the world – as a teacher in a dizzyingly changing world.
Faith Yacubian (Champlain College)
Faith Yacubian (preferred pronouns: she, her and they) is the Education and Human Studies Signature Course Coordinator at Champlain College and teaches in the Social Work Program and Core Division. She is a white, lesbian, abled body/mind, born Christian, raised middl-class, Armenian-American; these identities inform how she views, interprets and creates the world in which she lives. Faith has been working and learning in the field of Social Justice Education since 2001. And, since that time, Faith has engaged students who take her classes with the contributions that radical activists, such as Sylvia Rivera, critical educators, such as Paulo Freire, and feminist theories, as in bell hooks’ writing, have offered to the discourse of social justice. She is grateful for their courage to speak and lead. Faith is driven by the belief that students can do the same.