Good to Great

Four positions for which we are planning promise to catapult our school forward, adding significant services to students and enabling us to support very good teachers to become great and great teachers to become even greater.

Positions:

Enrichment Specialist: An enrichment specialist whose role will be to support teachers to design enrichment experiences for students will join our department of student services. This educator will work directly with students who, based on assessment, demonstrate the need for enrichment or acceleration exceeding grade-level learning. The enrichment specialist will be able to teach students in their classrooms and, as needed, pull students out of class to provide an enriched curriculum. In addition, our enrichment specialist will serve as a coach to teachers, assisting us to design enrichment experiences that will challenge and nurture the talents and passions of all our students.

Singapore Math Coach: As we implement a Singapore math curriculum in the school, we will benefit from the “gold standard” of professional learning in curriculum implementation for our teachers – an outside expert providing five days of intensive training for teachers as well as a workshop for parents, alongside a full-time in-house coach to provide ongoing professional learning and training for our teachers.

Library/Media Specialist: Leading the process of shifting our magnificent library into a twenty-first century library/media center is vital to our efforts to prepare our students for success in our rapidly changing media-rich world. We will be welcoming a library/media specialist to our faculty who will support our students to develop research and media literacy skills. Our library and media specialist will also coach our classroom teachers in more skillful integration of research, media, and literacy skills into educational experiences in the classroom.

Educational Technology Coach: Technology in the twenty-first century can no longer be relegated to a lab, but must be infused within classroom experiences. An educational technology coach will provide students with a comprehensive technology curriculum in the lab, but even more significantly, will support teachers to infuse daily learning experiences with technology in order to enhance and improve the quality of learning at our school.

Coaching Team:

What do the four positions described above share? You got it! Each of these positions includes some form of instructional coaching for our teachers. Our enrichment specialist, Singapore math coach, library/media specialist, and educational technology coach will join Ann Berlstein, our science coach, and Hadassah Wrightman, our Hebrew coach to form a coaching team. Jen Gensior, Chair of our Student Support Department, will also work with coaches and will be providing additional instructional coaching support to our faculty in literacy and learning strategies.

These instructional coaches or “teachers of teachers” will enable us to support very good and great teachers to become even greater. That commitment to the ongoing learning of teachers, not via outside workshops but through job-embedded learning experiences and collaboration among peers, is at the essence of what distinguishes the very best schools today.

Over the course of the next several months you will learn more about our curriculum enhancements, our hiring processes, and our instructional coaching team. You’ll have opportunities to meet our instructional coaches and gain greater insight into our commitment to continue to improve the quality of learning for our students. Please share with us your questions, insights, and ideas.

Applying Science and Math in the Real World

“We don’t have science anymore,” one of our fourth graders nonchalantly explained to me as he jotted notes on a clipboard rating the appropriateness of various areas on our campus to plant tulips for Journey North, an international citizen science project collecting data on climate change. 

“Really?” I queried. “But what are we doing now?”

“We’re figuring out the best location to plant tulips,” he replied.

“And why are we doing that?” I questioned.

“To help scientists learn about climate change,” he confidently answered.

“Isn’t that science?” I asked.

“Not really,” he answered.

That brief dialogue has remained with me for the past month, the most potent of a series of conversations and queries, mostly with parents, but sometimes with students as well, about our science program.  There’s also been much conversation about Singapore Math, coming soon to our school. To engage actively in this vital dialogue about science and math, we invite you to an important science/math curriculum evening, December 14 at 7:30 p.m. Come learn about how we are restructuring our science and math programs to ensure rigor, depth, creativity, and critical thinking.

As a preview to our conversation on December 14, let me share with you our primary goals:

• to prepare all of our children to have the conceptual framework and skills they will need to excel in middle and high school science and math courses, and
• to gain understanding of the vital issues in science and math our children will face in the real world, in their daily lives as well as in college, graduate programs and the ever-changing workplace

How do we reach those goals? In science, we have designed a program with strong units providing the fundamental knowledge and critical skills Lower School students need in both biological and physical science.  These units are learned primarily in the classrooms with the general studies teachers, supported by our science specialist, Ann Berlstein.

Mrs. Berlstein brings science to life through hands-on learning experiences in our in-door science lab as well as our outdoor labs — walking trails, the butterfly garden, and the vegetable garden.  She also infuses our classrooms with science centers and investigative learning experiences.

Science is no longer a “special.”  In the past labs were not necessarily connected to our classroom studies. Now, they are vital components of our science units. In addition, as with Journey North, students engage as participants in pressing scientific  concerns of our day.

In math, we will be implementing Singapore Math, a curriculum we have chosen because of its intensive focus on the skills and conceptual understandings necessary for success in higher level math. A faculty task force is currently designing the most effective ways for us to implement this method.

For us, as a mission- and values-driven school, the goal of science and math classes in general, and for academics more broadly, is not for students to collect good grades (as much as we are proud of our students’ good grades) but rather to prepare our children for lives of contribution and meaning.

We look forward to seeing you at our math and science curriculum night – December 14 at 7:30 p.m.  In the meantime, don’t hesitate to share your insights and questions so we can better design the evening to address your interests.