The Courage to Evolve
by Ryan Feeley, Assistant Head of School, Middle School Director
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fine line exists between valuing history and allowing it to paralyze you. I’ve always been proud of Berwick for standing on the right side of that line. Now, 230 years since our founding, our status as Maine’s oldest school and John Hancock’s signature on our charter are cherished emblems of our rich history, but they’ve never been barriers to our evolution. Rather than becoming stagnant and enamored with its history, Maine’s oldest school remains a forward-thinking place. Take Curriculum 2020. In 2014, Berwick established broad curricular goals that we believed would serve our students well in the future. When the plan 8 | WINTER 2021
was revealed, we received our share of questions. Do we really need to spend money on makerspaces? Why all the emphasis on cultural competency? Explain again why skills are more important than content? They were all fair questions then, and while I believe our answers were sound, nobody could have predicted what 2020 actually had in store for us, that the steps we began to take back in 2014 would prepare us to weather this current storm, ultimately emerging stronger than ever. Those Curriculum 2020 goals – skills over content, innovation, cultural competency, wellness – have turned out to be useful knowledge for our new reality. Our emphasis on innovation helped us pivot to remote learning, our successes largely due to faculty and students having grown accustomed to creative problem-solving. Our focus on wellness readied us to support students through this historic public health crisis. Our commitment to cultural competency prepared us to navigate America’s reckoning with injustice and systemic racism. Prioritizing
