The Courage to Evolve

by Ryan Feeley, Assistant Head of School, Middle School Director

Afine 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 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

Students snowshoeing on campus

skills over content has helped us negotiate a world where “facts” seem less and less objective.

No doubt it’s been a difficult year, but imagine where we’d be if not for our willingness to evolve. We continue to value our history, but we don’t let it paralyze us. Since that mindset has served us so well, we now turn our attention to what lies ahead. The confluence of the pandemic, increasing political polarization, and widespread social unrest related to systemic racism has created seismic disruptions nationally and globally that will significantly impact the nature of work and, consequently, the nature of schools in the coming years. These disruptions prompt questions we must consider as we continue to evolve.

Over the next several months, we’ll specifically examine Berwick’s systems, meaning the structures and processes supporting teaching and learning. Examples of systems include: departmental structure, graduation requirements, advisory systems, school calendar, and cross-divisional transitions, to name a few.

Using these national and global disruptions as our lens, we’ll ask ourselves if our systems continue to serve our students well in a nuanced, difficult-to-predict global future. Questions we’ll wrestle with include: Will Berwick’s graduation requirements remain relevant in a world in which how people work is rapidly changing? How might an evolving departmental structure help us blend STEAM with MESH (Media Literacy, Ethics, Sociology, and History) and JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) to develop students who are both innovators and compassionate, informed community activists in the future? What does it mean to work and learn on the Seacoast, and do our current systems allow us to leverage local partnerships fully? Does our professional development program provide our faculty with what they need to teach students during such tumultuous times? Are there changes to our operations prompted by COVID-19 that should be made permanent?

These questions will likely inspire further questions rather than easy answers. We’ll need to draw from many perspectives to anticipate what the future holds. But, if our goal is to continue as a forward-thinking school, we must have the courage to ask these challenging questions, to evolve while honoring the soul of Berwick, and to move forward together into the new normal. I’m excited about this next chapter, and I look forward to the discoveries we’ll make together.