About the Author
Bil Johnson has returned to the classroom to teach 9th and 11th Grade Social Stuides/History to at the Urban Assembly School for Design and Construction at 525 W. 50th Street in NYC. Prior to that he was a teacher at Essex Street Academy on the Lower East Side of NYC and the Field Supervisor for the Yale Teacher Preparation Program in New Haven, Connecticut. Before working at Yale, he was a Senior Lecturer and the Director of Social Studies/History Education in the Brown University Master of Arts in Teaching Program for 12 years. A former member of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform National Faculty, Mr. Johnson has over 25 years experience as a public school teacher. A 1971 graduate of Yale University, with a Master of Arts in Teaching from Colgate University (1973), he has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships (1983 at Yale, 1986 at Columbia), a Council for Basic Education Independent Study Fellowship (1987), a Federal Title IV-C Grant to study with the late Lawrence Kohlberg at Harvard's Center for Moral Education (1981), and he directed a Title IV Federal Grant Program for "Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum" for the Winchester (MA) school district in 1986. He also received Winchester’s “Golden Apple Award” (voted by the students) as the school’s outstanding teacher in 1986-87. In 1993-94 and 1994-95 Mr. Johnson was one of the Founders (and a Lead Teacher) of the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, in Devens, Massachusetts, one of the first 15 Charter Schools in that state.
Mr. Johnson has worked extensively with Theodore Sizer, Grant Wiggins, Linda Darling-Hammond and Heidi Hayes Jacobs on School Change, Performance Assessment, and Integrated Curriculum and has served as a consultant for a host of schools nationally and internationally. He has conducted summer institutes at Brown University and has presented at numerous national conferences and assemblies. He has also been a member of The Four Seasons Project, a National Faculty on Authentic Assessment under the direction of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (Teachers College, Columbia University), an alliance between the Coalition, Harvard's Project Zero, and the Foxfire Network. For the 2000-2001 academic year, Mr. Johnson received the William G. McLoughlin Award for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences from Brown University. He was also awarded a Henry Merrit Wriston Fellowship for the spring semester, 2005, the highest award given to a junior faculty member at Brown. He spent the fall term, 2004, teaching at an alternative high school in Fairbanks, Alaska while on sabbatical from Brown.
Mr. Johnson is the author of the two-volume book, The Performance Assessment Handbook: Designs from the Field and Guidelines for the Territory Ahead (Eye on Education Publishers, 1996/East China Normal University Press 2001) as well as The Student-Centered Secondary Classroom -A Guide to Implementation (Eye on Education, 2002).