Lower School

May 2008

Posted 5.5.08

Dear Lower School Parents,

I had a fascinating conversation with Mary Richman (our PreK -1 dance teacher) and Don Militello (our PreK -1 music teacher) at last Wednesday’s faculty meeting. We were talking about the nature of art and the effect it had on children. We were then joined by Lawrence Yasner, one of the Lower School PE teachers and continued to talk about that same improvisational thrill that comes in all three of these disciplines that I wrote about back in December. All around the room other teachers were similarly discussing what lay at the heart of their disciplines and the units they teach. There was a “what if?” tone to the discussions that I loved to hear.

These conversations happened because we were discussing a new program (curriculum mapping) that we will be using, and one of the concepts (essential questions) that lies behind it. Simply put, curriculum mapping means we write down what we teach on a web-based program rather than on paper, as we have done up until now. But schools, our middle school for example, have taken it as a chance to do much more, and use it to carefully think about the flow of the whole curriculum. And before jumping into an analysis of what is taught, it’s obvious that we should think carefully about the big ideas that animate the year’s study. These ideas are framed as questions, essential questions, some of the answers to which are explored in the units of study. The mark of a good essential question is that there is no one right answer: they are deliberately open-ended, allowing teachers to adapt to the needs of the children and class.

So while the mapping is fairly straightforward—we write down what we’re going to do, we adjust the map to reflect what has actually been taught, we analyze the balance of what has been taught for effectiveness, and then we prepare to teach it again next year—essential questions are more complex.

One benefit of working on them is that by looking at the questions at the heart of a unit of study, or at the heart of an entire discipline, you’re better able to pare away the extraneous parts that may have crept in over the years because they seemed like fun or because they were inherited from a previous teacher. And teachers are better able to relate the parts to the whole. So, if you take a subject like music or dance in the preschool years and ask a question like, “How does music make you feel?” you can see that you can build a whole unit on it, looking at rhythm, tempo, coloration of sound. Similarly in First Grade if you were to ask, “What makes a neighborhood?” you would see that you can build a curriculum out of that. For PreK, K and First Grade math you could ask, “What is a pattern?” and expect increasingly complex answers as the children move from one grade to another.

The temptation for teachers is to ask the essential question that allows you to teach what you want to teach, “Why is Abel’s Island the best book ever written?” or to ask an essential question that makes you think you’re back in grad school—I facetiously suggested we base the Second Grade art curriculum on the question “Is good taste a bourgeois construct?” Fear not, Maxine Barnett and Ellen Arana, our educational directors, with their broad overview and in-the-trenches knowledge of the day-to-day curriculum, are leading the faculty on this task, making sure there’s a focus on both the broad sweep of the curriculum and yet also room for teachers to teach their passions. The latter concept is crucial—it’s one of the things that attracts people to teach in independent schools.

So, starting at the end of this year, once the students have left, the whole Lower School faculty will be looking at their curriculum’s essential questions. We’re having a workshop with a woman called Heidi Hayes Jacob who is one of the inspirational founders of the movement to do this, and we’ll be spending time working on it next year. The work that the math and social studies curriculum committees have done has taken us a long way down this path already—it’s really a matter of putting it on line now for these curriculum areas, so we’ll be mapping those first next year. And teachers will be writing and refining their essential questions as they move through the 2008-2009 year. We’ll continue to have committees—all the teachers will be on one, but more of us will be on the social studies committee and the math committee so that we can get these mapped. And then we’ll move to the other parts of the curriculum in 2009-2010. Lots of work to be done here, but there was a real energy in the room last Wednesday as people started the process, and I’m delighted to be part of it.

I have some reminders to end with:

Placement: It’s much better if teachers can make the first decisions about which classes students go into next year without worrying about parent requests. The teachers almost always see the things you see, but also have a broader view of who works well with whom. The goal is to get the right mix for the whole class. That said, there are occasionally reasons or circumstances that parents know about that the teachers might not. If that is the case, please email me and let me know. I look at the lists later in the process and can adjust if necessary. This system has worked well for the last two years, thank you.

Photography: After a great deal of work (more than you’d think!) Christina Shane and Kim Bourne have helped us come up with a new school photographer. We’ll be using a company called Coffeepond. They have a good track record and use a web based system, as we have been pushing for. I look forward to working with them in the fall.

Parenting tips: We had a number of great speakers this year, but I particularly enjoyed Dr. Lawrence Balter’s presentation on April 22 about parental limit setting. He had some great advice on how to work with children, PreK-Sixth Grade, and has summarized them in a series of tips. These are available to download PA’s page of the website under PA downloads, in the bottom right corner.

End of year gifts: There’s a generous and understandable urge to thank our wonderful teachers by buying them a gift. But, as the Fourth Grade play made so clear: words have power. Please convert that urge to buy a gift into words, spoken or written, or something made, not bought. Teachers really do appreciate hearing what has changed for children during a year, and the school’s policy on no gift giving is clear. I do think it’s different for teachers who are getting married, or having babies, but even then please be mindful that not everyone in a class may be able to, or even want to, participate. Once again, I appreciate the good place this urge comes from, so thank you.

Calendar: Do keep checking the website’s calendar for details of all the end of school events—there’s a lot going on in these last six weeks! For those of you who are planning next year, the basic dates are on the calendar through June 2009.

As usual, please call or email if you have any questions or comments.

Yours,


Benedict Chant
Lower School Director