Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Piercing the Bubble

This week we were so fortunate to have former NH Senator Kelly Ayotte address grades 7 – 11 in our theater about Civil Discourse in a time of Political Polarization. Senator Ayotte spoke to the need to take the high road in tough conversations and put an incredible primacy on building relationships with people who hold different opinions. She was able to speak to some of her own successes in working across the aisle to develop legislation to address the opioid crisis in New Hampshire as one powerful example of how this can be possible. Additionally, Senator Ayotte offered a strong reminder to our students of the need for more women in positions of leadership within our government, citing that she had only been the 53rd woman to serve in the US senate during her tenure. With a down-to-earth style and but an appropriately impassioned call to action, she challenged our students to become the leaders that they could be. Her call to action and example of service were powerful reminder...
Post a Comment
Read more

Designing the Revolution

As Berwick parents know, we made a decision to use our professional day for 2015 to attend the National Association of Independent Schools conference, which happened to be in Boston this year. Given that this event usually comes to Boston once per decade, it was a unique opportunity to expose our entire faculty to the national conversation at independent schools. When we scheduled it a year ago, the decision to close school on February 27 and bus our teachers to Boston seemed like a no-brainer. After four snow days this winter, I must admit that it seemed a bit more audacious as the actual day approached. Most of all, I want to thank our families for allowing this to happen. The experience turned out to be remarkable on a number of levels. I was honored to be a part of the “Think Tank” planning group in Boston, which landed on a theme of Designing the Revolution for Independent Schools. This theme spoke to a combination of innovation, design thinking, and new leadership required f...
1 comment
Read more

Behind the scenes

I often like to use the word authenticity when talking about Berwick Academy. I have said that I feel more able to be myself at Berwick than any place I have worked to date; it truly is a gift to feel that way. For parents, we usually focus on the teachers and coaches who make our kids’ lives so dynamic, and we forget the people behind the scenes who make the Berwick experience possible: maintenance, custodial, food, transportation, and support staff, etc. Berwick could not deliver the program it delivers without such high quality yet largely unheralded work. The same could be said of the Head of School. I am quick to point out that being a father is far more humbling than being a Head of School. There is no way on earth that I could have possibly moved this school forward without the unquestioned support of my wife, Amy. I often marvel that, in addition to dealing with a husband who can be tired and grumpy at the end of long days, she somehow has managed to catalyze the amazing...
1 comment
Read more