A PROGRESS REPORT RETHINKING COMMUNITY TIME For Derryfield faculty, staff and students, assembling each Monday in the auditorium for Community Meeting is simply routine. We convene to celebrate great triumphs, contemplate the big questions, and share our talents and interests. This spring, as we found ourselves home and unable to gather in person, there was tremendous comfort in sticking to this routine. Every Monday at 1:20 p.m., the entire school huddled around their devices as members of our community continued to celebrate one another, navigate this challenging time together, and listen and watch our talented peers perform.
goal 1: belonging “ Build a sense of belonging and identity within the Derryfield family.”
All Community Meeting recordings, including Founders’ Day, are posted on the Derryfield YouTube Channel.
VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 If you had dropped into a remote classroom at Virtual Derryfield this spring, you would have seen a Brady Bunch quilt of students and teachers connected by laughter, lively debate, project pitches, and challenging discussion—transformative teaching and learning with that Derryfield twist of joy.
learning through real-world projects and assessments, building on Derryfield’s historic commitment to critical thinking and creativity. This in turn has led us to redesigng communication, collaboration, and problem-solving in light of 21st century media and technology. Those programmatic additions have served us well during this time.
When COVID-19 hit, we were ready. While we too shouldered uncertainty, our teachers and our students transitioned nimbly and with courage into this new mode of learning because we were well versed in change. Eight years ago, when we joined the Malone School Online Network, Derryfield teachers began teaching online, learning how to build community in a virtual classroom and how to design inspiring projects that required students to practice real-world skills of problem solving in virtual teams. When we went “one-to-one,” learning changed exponentially as the walls of the classrooms expanded to include digital platforms and experiences and resources in the real world. Suddenly, Ph.D. students from national university research centers were interviewing our Advanced Topics Biology students and NHPR reporters video conferenced with tenth graders about podcasting.
So, join us. Go to the Virtual Learning page of the website to see more of what is happening in virtual Derryfield classrooms. In AT Investment Math, watch as seniors consolidate a year of high-level math with a pitch as they market their hedge fund to four new clients, a CFO, average investors, and our Dean of Innovation. You’ll hear them explaining how their algorithm anticipates the fluctuations of the market in the pandemic, and reaching out to customers with new tools and positive financial gains. In Anatomy and Physiology, students researched the body’s response to stress; on the recording of our Community Meeting on Youtube you can watch their videos on strategies to alleviate that anxiety. Click on the writings, “On Living in the Time of COVID-19,” by the junior and senior Creative Writing class, written in response to C.S. Lewis’s “On Living in an Atomic Age.”
Integrating technology and digital communication into our classrooms aligned with our goals: students were inspired to be engaged in real-world experiences that put their learning to work, and they are thriving. As a community we all learned to be flexible, to experiment and adapt, and to laugh as we collaborated.
While COVID-19 has been an unprecedented challenge, it has also been a gift as our community embraced the core value of character stated in our Academic VIsion: Derryfield cultivates ethical, community-oriented leaders who are innovative problem solvers of real world challenges.
We transitioned smoothly because of the thoughtful work of our teachers over the last three years. Derryfield teachers researched and designed a new Academic Vision and a new schedule to create more time. We introduced 14 new Advanced Topic (AT) Courses anchored in interdisciplinary research and collaborative projects. We created LEAD, a program designed to educate students in emotional and social intelligence, resiliency, and leadership. Across the disciplines, in grades 6-12, teachers have moved toward
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goal 2: leading “ Develop a cohesive, coordinated middle and upper school program with an emphasis on academic and co-curricular skills most relevant to a 21st century education.”
