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Curriculum 2020 at Work

            Coming back from Thanksgiving, it has been amazing to see some of the new
curricular initiatives coming to life. In the Middle School alone, we are seeing
incredible new innovations. Our Middle School faculty have worked to restructure
time within the existing schedule in our 6th and 7th grades to offer more interdisciplinary and student-driven work. Our 6th grade unit, Footprints, focuses on sustainability as well as the theme of leaving one’s legacy.  Students have been engaged in designing a range of independent pursuits including work on designing and planning a garden, exploring the impact of theater on social interaction, analyzing data related to junk mail, spearheading a clothing drive for an orphanage in Guatemala, and many others.  Meanwhile, our 7th graders have been engaged in Disease Detectives, an interdisciplinary unit focused on infectious diseases, their impact on cultures, and scientific and political efforts to eradicate disease.  In addition to reading a common novel, playing the collaborative game Pandemic, and hearing from various speakers, every 7th grader has chosen a student-driven exploration area of focus during the Disease Detective unit in one of the following areas: science, history, art, mathematics, and literature.  The student-driven explorations will culminate in the creation of an area-focused website featuring student research, creative writing, and artwork.  And finally, a new effort to take silo projects and have them cross disciplinary boundaries can be seen in the Global Ex projects, where students will be doing meaningful work researching nations around the world, and tackling hard global challenges in a blending of their social studies and science classes. It is the first time we have tried these initiatives, so it is certainly messy and, at times, unpredictable. But teachers and students alike are energized to try something new, learn from it, and make it even better in the future.  


           Global Ex Food Festival

Additionally, I had one of my more exciting meetings in recent memory as we brought together our curriculum council, the librarians, and our new Maker in Residence to contemplate how we might create a new learning space on campus that might continue to catalyze creativity, building, and showcasing new knowledge. The conversation traversed the topics of Makerspaces, Fab Labs, digital media, set design, and expanded opportunities for adults and students to work collaboratively on real world problems. Certainly there are many obstacles out there: space, money, and our schedule top the list. But as Head of School, I was so excited to see consensus emerge that we needed to push ahead and think about how a more social, interactive, and collaborative learning hub could vault our program forward. We all agreed that the physical space is merely one small part of the larger conversation of implementing the philosophical goals of Curriculum 2020.


Different weeks in the life of a Head of School end up having very different feelings associated with them – ranging from exhilaration to frustration to exhaustion. This week leaves me with such a feeling of optimism about the work our teachers are doing to make the Berwick education livelier, more current, and more engaging for your children. I can’t wait to see what next week brings.

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