the tartan A magazine of Glen Urquhart School
december 2014
SAVE THE DATE GLEN URQUHART’S FIRST ALL-CLASS BLOW-OUT
REUNION SATURDAY NOVEMBER 28, 2015
W EVENING SOIREÉ FOR OVER 21s W
W AFTERNOON GET TOGETHER FOR UNDER 21s W RECONNECT WITH CLASSMATES AND FAVORITE TEACHERS. SAVOR LOCAL CRAFT BEER AND WINE, GOURMET APPETIZERS, AND THEMED DESSERTS (THINK SKYSCRAPERS, LIGHTHOUSES, VOLCANOS, AND WHALES). ENJOY LIVE MUSIC AND CONVERSATION. THERE WILL EVEN BE A BLACK BOOK FOR YOU TO SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS AND DOODLES!
2014 – 2015 BOARD OF TRUSTEES Alexander S. McGrath President Bob Carroll Vice President Mollie Hoopes Vice President Bruce Shaw Vice President John McNiff Jr. Treasurer Martha Burnham Clerk
table of contents message from the head of school. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 anna solomon greenbaum. . . . . . . 4 “Intensely imagined . . . Elegantly written.” —Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife
ms. smith goes to beijing. . . . . . . . 10 the toughest week they’ll ever love. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 gus: 10, harvard: 0 project zero. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Dave Provost Head of School Susan Tsao Esty Philip Furse Carl Graves Lauren Gudonis Jodi Llacera Klein Daniel LeVan Suzanne Mitchell Sallie Pottle Lisa Sandouk-Romanelli Joan Rosenthal Steve Todd Marit von Tetzchner
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Lynne Warren Life Trustee
Trust and go forward,
remember the old greenhouses on campus in sad disrepair? Today, one is in full use as a classroom for hands-on learning and growth — pun intended! thank you, dick harrison (maggie ’14)!
Welcome to the first issue of The Tartan, Glen Urquhart School’s new magazine for alumni, current families, and past parents! We plan to publish one large issue each December and a smaller supplemental issue in the summer. The winter issue will include profiles of alumni, news about exciting initiatives on campus, and other feature stories of interest to the GUS alumni and families. The summer issue will cover commencement and other events. Starting next winter, we will include Class Notes, so be sure to start sending your news to me at jklein@gus.org. Weddings, jobs, graduations, babies, adventures, achievements, meetings with other alumni in random locales or down the street — all are suitable topics for Class Notes. So, don’t be shy! Happy reading! Judith Klein Editor
Glen Urquhart welcomes students and faculty of any race, color, or ethnic origin to all rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students and faculty of the school. Glen Urquhart does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, physical impairment, national, or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational, hiring, or admissions policies, financial assistance programs, and athletic or other administrated programs.
Tartan Editor: Judith Klein P’95, ’00, ’04 Cover Photo: Kim Lowe Design: Graphic Details Printing: Cummings Printing Every effort has been made to ensure that the information in The Tartan is accurate. Please direct any errors to the editor at jklein@gus.org.
The Tartan is published for alumni, parents, and friends of Glen Urquhart School. Please send address changes and other communications to: Alumni Office Glen Urquhart School 74 Hart Street Beverly Farms, MA 01915 Phone: 978-927-1064 ext. 111 ecollupy@gus.org www.gus.org
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MESSAGE FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL
Dear Friends and Families, Two and a half years into my tenure as head of Glen Urquhart School, I continue to be amazed by how much our extended family means to so many. Perennial visits by alumni, past parents, grandparents, and others remind us each year that our work has lasting impact on the lives of our students and families. This should, perhaps, not surprise us, given the nature of teaching and learning at GUS and the strong bonds that are forged between teacher and student in our classrooms. In addition, our rich, varied, and unique traditions and rites of passage further embed meaning on the formative elementary and middle school years. I could not be more excited to extend an invitation to all of you to reconnect with GUS. Your experience, your stories and memories, and your perspective on the school are still absolutely essential to us as the foundation of the work we continue in earnest today. Without a complete understanding of where we’ve been, we cannot be fully confident in where we’re going. As you leaf through these pages, please take the opportunity to leaf through your most treasured memories of Glen Urquhart, and please share them generously with the knowledge that we will value them similarly. My sincere hope is that this publication and the renewed communication to follow will help build a well-traveled bridge between our school’s past and its future. Nothing could be more precious to us than your continued interest and participation in the life of this vibrant and everexpanding community. I am confident that your re-exploration will reveal much that is familiar and much that is new. I look forward to hearing from you, to seeing you on campus, and to a continued celebration of our shared love and appreciation for Glen Urquhart School. Trust and Go Forward!
David M. Provost Head of School
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We are proud to announce the FIRST ANNUAL
GUS Alumni Speaker Series Presenting three accomplished GUS graduates: SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 2015 @ 4 PM
Anna Solomon (Greenbaum) ’90 Author of The Little Bride Editor of Labor Day
FALL 2015, DATE TBA
Abby Alexanian ’03 Producer of Journey to Armenia: Three Generations from Genocide
FALL 2015, DATE TBA
John Swansburg ’92 Deputy Editor of Slate.com
Please join us for this exciting opportunity to hear these GUS graduates speak about their work and their professional lives. Refreshments and Q&A will follow the presentations. Free. No reservations required, but RSVPs requested online at www.gus.org.
ALUMNA PROFILE
Anna Solomon Greenbaum ’90 nna Solomon Greenbaum ’90, author of the acclaimed novel, The Little Bride, and a new novel coming out soon, always knew she wanted to write, though she wasn’t sure what form her writing would take. In fact, it was not until after college at Brown University that she began to write fiction seriously. It was then that she moved back home to Gloucester for a year to waitress and attend workshops at GrubStreet, a creative writing center in Boston. Soon after, through family and friends, she snagged an internship with NPR’s Sandy Tolan who was doing a piece for the series, Living on Earth. Before long, Anna transitioned into a job on the show, becoming a radio producer for four years in Cambridge and then DC, covering environmental policy and politics in the nation’s capitol right before 9/11. “I learned a tremendous amount,” she recalls. “It was a great experience journalistically.” She also learned the old school editing skills of taping and cutting reel to reel. And she grew to love radio, a field she thinks she may return to one day, next time focusing more on what she describes as “long form narrative reporting and radio storytelling” rather than producing.
“Intensely imagined . . . Elegantly written.” —Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife
While working in Cambridge, Anna was feverishly writing fiction on the train ride back and forth from her home in Providence each day. “I was very committed to it, but couldn’t afford to just write fiction,” she says. It was not a viable career path at that point, so she felt lucky to have radio as something that she both enjoyed and that paid the bills. Her job security soon allowed Anna to consider graduate school. “I got to the point where I was established in radio enough so that I knew I could come back to it,” she says. “I was not attached, had no kids, and could go to grad school and have two years just to write.” As extra security, she only applied to fully funded programs to be assured she would have no debt when she finished. She was accepted to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, considered by many the penultimate training ground for fine writers. “It was wonderful,” she recalls. “I had a tremendous amount of time to write; I had people to read for me and I could read for them.” After completing the program, she had an agent, but was still not sure of her path. She published some short stories, but she needed a steady income so she began to teach and write for periodicals, while creating fiction on her own time. She also started a family, marrying Michael Burger, a classmate from Brown and a professor who teaches in the field of environmental and climate law. The couple now have two children, Sylvie, almost 7, and Sam, 2. Her first novel, The Little Bride, was published in 2011 by Penguin Group USA, a well respected publisher, as a trade paperback. Her new book, set in Anna’s hometown of Gloucester in the 1920s, is about a baby who is abandoned and the people and family involved in her life ten years later. It sold to a publisher for more than The Little Bride. Nonetheless, neither will earn “enough money to raise a family on,” Anna says, explaining that she, like most of her writing colleagues still needs to “teach or speak or write for magazines — to balance art and commerce.” These days,
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF ANNA SOLOMON GREENBAUM
(Left) Anna with her husband, Michael Burger, and kids, Sam and Sylvie. (Right) Anna Solomon Greenbaum receiving her diploma at Glen Urquhart from the president of the Board of Trustees, Ken Carlson.
she is teaching creative non-fiction in the English Department at Brown. Young writers are “lucky to be writing when creative non-fiction is coming of age and has gained ground on a more popular level,” Anna says. “This helps young writers see it as a possible avenue for themselves.” She, too, is starting to write more essays again. Looking back at her years at Glen Urquhart, Anna says she “always felt encouraged creatively at GUS. I had some very good teachers — Penny Randolph comes to mind as someone who really taught me how to read,” a skill she counts as absolutely necessary for any writer. She fondly recalls the black books and beginning to write stories even in first grade. Anna believes that the creative movement and art classes at GUS “encouraged expression as part of a larger creative conversation. Teachers took kids’ stories and creations seriously at GUS,” she recalls, “which I think is pretty unusual.” Anna Solomon Greenbaum will be the first presenter in our new Glen Urquhart Alumni Speaker Series, appearing on Sunday, April 26 at 4 p.m. to speak about her books and her life as a writer. Her books will be on sale and she will be happy to sign them after her presentation and a Q&A session. The event is free and open to the public.
Reviews for THE LITTLE BRIDE
“Emotionally honest... A fascinating...page-turner. ” USA TODAY
“Minna is a terrifically complex heroine: a little snobby, a little selfish and wholly sympathetic.” THE NEW YORK TIMES
“The prose is exquisite as are the descriptions of the landscape…a writer to watch.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
THE LITTLE BRIDE When 16-year-old Minna Losk journeys from Odessa to America in the late 1890s as a mail-order bride, she dreams of a young, wealthy husband, a handsome townhouse, and freedom from physical labor and pogroms. But her husband Max turns out to be twice her age, rigidly Orthodox, and living in a one-room sod hut in South Dakota with his two teenage sons. The country is desolate, the work treacherous. Most troubling, Minna finds herself increasingly attracted to her older stepson. As a brutal winter closes in, the family’s limits are tested, and Minna, drawing on strengths she barely knows she has, is forced to confront her despair, as well as her desire. (from Anna Solomon’s website)
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T S E H G U TO LOVE
THE
W
R E V E L L ’ Y E H T K EE
F
or one week each April, Glen Urquhart eighth graders eat rice and beans, work in the hot sun, build concrete walls, muck animal stalls, paint buildings, sleep in hogans or fourbed rooms, prepare gardens, cut sugar cane, cook meals for up to 200 children, and engage in other demanding labor. At the end of the eight-plus days, as they fall exhausted into the arms of their families at Logan Airport, they will report having had the time of their lives.
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photos from work week in the dominican republic
This is GUS Work Week. For eighth graders, whose theme is “Where do I live?” and “Where am I going?,” the trips to either an orphanage in the Dominican Republic or a Navajo Reservation in Arizona are a natural culmination of their year’s study, according to Head of School Dave Provost. Of course, “the service component is central to the ethos of the school,” he explains. But beyond that, “the opportunity to travel, to encounter another culture, language, customs, expectations, combined with the opportunity to serve in a meaningful and tangible way is one of the most memorable and valuable experiences our students will ever have in their lives.” The trip to Latin America began several years ago when Spanish teacher Barbara Kelley took a group of eighth graders to an orphanage in Honduras. Because of some political unrest, the location has moved to the DR in recent years, to another orphanage located on 50 acres in the midst of a sugar cane field. The self-inclusive community includes a church, school, clinic, gardens, dorms, and visitor housing for volunteers. GUS students labor for five hours each morning, then break for lunch with the children, play games with them, and help them with homework before returning to their housing to journal. In the late afternoon, they rejoin the children for some games and recreation before eating their staple dinner of rice and beans.
There are only two requirements for participating in the trip, explains Sra. Kelley. Students need to be prepared to eat rice and beans and be willing to have kids hanging on them! “There are 215 kids there to be played with,” she emphasizes, so the eighth graders need to be ready. The upside of the trip? “Sure, the kids develop language proficiency and cultural awareness and that is all well and good,” says Sra. Kelley, “but what it really gives them is an opportunity to live simply and to understand that you can be happy with so much less. In just a week, they understand that material possessions do not necessarily mean happiness. The children in the orphanage came from very poor backgrounds, abandoned in the streets, in living conditions we can’t imagine.” Now living in the orphanage, they are so happy and so grateful for what the eighth graders take for granted. Seeing this, “the GUS kids feel so lucky to have their parents, to go to school, to feel secure,” Sra. Kelley observes. “They have a whole new vision after just one week.” For Sra. Kelley, that is the most valuable aspect of the experience. That, and working harder than they have ever worked in their lives. “After five hours, they are exhausted,” she says. “It is a change to do real work and it plants a seed for the rest of their lives at such a young, impressionable age when they are both full of themselves but also idealistic. It gives them the opportunity to get outside of themselves and to tap into their idealism.”
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The trip to the Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Arizona, developed when the school was seeking a new domestic companion experience to the Latin American trip. Initially, there were trips to post-Katrina New Orleans and Appalachia, but a Native American reservation seemed a perfect destination for the eighth graders, a logical extension of all they have studied since kindergarten. The first trip was to Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where it snowed 28 inches on the third day, and, yes, this was April. Rethinking was clearly in order. Through the Beverly YMCA, GUS was able to partner with the Amizade organization and plan the current destination in Tuba City, just 50 miles east of Grand Canyon National Park. Though Amizade usually works with colleges, providing leadership and curriculum, they were happy to work with GUS, even having a group leader on-site. Eighth graders slept in hogans — traditional Navajo dwellings — at night, and during the day improved the site around the sweat lodge, prepared the garden at a local school, and did considerable cooking. The day they arrived, recalls Dave Provost, they were asked to the birthday party of a ten-year-old. Once there, they were asked if they would like to help prepare the food. Sure, they replied, not knowing the work would entail slaughtering a sheep! “Some participated, others did not,” says Dave, “but it was a good lesson for the students that not all meat comes from Crosby’s.” Every evening, a guest speaker shared information and skills with the students. Topics included weaving, music, dancing, and the Navajo language. “Some of the most memorable moments were in the hogan after hours,” says Dave, “listening to the boys debrief and share stories from their full day.” “What impresses me most about this trip,” says Annie Barton, who coordinates the trips and is a GUS upper school coach, “is that this is our own nation we are visiting, a part of America our students would never get to see otherwise, a different culture within our country.” The eighth graders may choose to go on either trip. Usually, about half of the class chooses each one. “Our school’s philosophy is built on the notion that students learn most authentically when they are active, not passive, doing, not watching,” says Dave. “The work week trips are, perhaps, the best example of our core belief in action.”
photos from work week at navajo nation
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Ms.SmithGoes toBeijing! to China for a conference in 2006, sent by GUS, and returned several times. We asked Merelyn to tell us about her new experiences in China.
What made you decide to move to China? What are your goals?
National Day in China at a tourist site. Note earmuffs!
Merelyn Smith
began her teaching career in 1979 at the two-year-old North Shore Middle School, soon to be renamed Glen Urquhart School. Fresh out of Gordon College with a Bachelor’s degree in elementary and special education, Merelyn was hired at the young independent school for grades 5 – 8. “I taught all of the original eight students,” she recalls. “I was a fifth grade teacher for the first eight years at GUS. During my last year of teaching fifth grade, I taught one seventh grade mathematics class to see if I liked teaching at that age level.” She did. When an upper school math position opened up the following year, it was offered to her, along with teaching computer and study skills. For the next almost 30 years, picking up a Master’s degree in Mathematics for Teachers along the way, Merelyn taught hundreds of students to love and understand mathematics through innovative curricula she developed for GUS. Because of her unique and, yes, demanding approach, GUS students stand out for their preparedness and skills when they enter secondary school. Last year, however, Merelyn announced that she was ready for a new challenge. Her destination? Beijing. Her goal? To learn Chinese and teach English to Chinese adults. She left in July to begin two years of language study in China in preparation for a teaching job. Perhaps no one should have been surprised. In fact, Merelyn had already earned a graduate certificate in teaching English to students of other languages from Salem State University. And she had traveled
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GUS sent me to China in November 2006 for an education conference. I fell in love with the people and culture while here. Since then, I have been coming back to China each summer to teach, with the exception of 2008 when the Olympics were here. This time I have come to stay for about eight to ten years. China is in need of native English teachers to teach English in their schools. Therefore, I will be teaching primarily in my native language, but look forward to having knowledge of Chinese to help explain things further, make comparisons between the two languages, and use the language to speak with people I meet every day. My dream job is to teach English in a university that trains teachers. I enjoy working with teachers, and I am looking forward to perfecting my English teaching skills, just as I did with mathematics.
Where and what are you studying? What are the challenges and rewards of learning a new language? I am living in Beijing studying Mandarin as a full-time student at Beijing Open University. I have two classes for an hour and a half each for a total of three hours each morning. The teachers are all native Chinese speakers. For only being in class a little over a month, though, I have learned an incredible amount of Chinese, so I can’t be too hard on myself. I see students who are more advanced than I am who are much more fluent, so I know with time and effort, my language skills will improve.
I really enjoy being in a culture where I can practice the language in real-life situations. I love studying language. I find that much of the same thinking in mathematics can be applied to studying language, except that now I am looking at patterns of language rather than patterns of numbers. Much of the knowledge is cumulative, just as it is in mathematics.
Describe your community in Beijing. I love being a part of an international community. There are 10 students in my class, two from Indonesia, two from Tajikistan, one from Canada, one from Korea, one from UK, one from Turkmenistan, and me, from the US. I am the only Caucasian in the class and the only Caucasian in the dorm where I live. The university has students from about 20 different countries around the world, so I get to meet people from even more countries during break time and from living in the dorm. The two countries most represented in the dorm where I live are Indonesia and Korea. There are also a number of students from Russian-speaking countries living in the dorm. I have many contacts with Chinese nationals, largely as a result of the teaching program that I did here in Beijing in the summer for four weeks before I moved onto my university campus. I taught conversational English to university freshman who were all business majors. The program included about 400 people, both students and teachers, so I also got to know some teachers who teach at universities here in Beijing. I am part of a WeChat group (social media) with some teachers in the city. I also have contacts with ex-pats. For one thing, all of the people in the university where I am studying are foreigners except for our teachers and staff. I also know some ex-pats from previous summer trips to Beijing. Networking is quite easy here.
Though you are not teaching or studying mathematics, have you had an opportunity to share your skills and experience as a math teacher? I brought Cuisenaire and Base Ten overhead rods with me to China. I met a third grade teacher two weekends ago who teaches in an international school here. She asked me for some strategies to help one of her students who has been diagnosed with dyscalculia. I met
Merelyn ca. 1980
Merelyn with GUS alum Parker Malarkey
Making Jiaozi Chinese dumplings.
with the teacher a week ago and gave her some strategies we used at GUS. Yesterday, I went to her school to work with the girl to see where her strengths and weaknesses are in learning mathematics. Of course, I love helping teachers and children, so I was overjoyed with the experience. I think my knowledge of teaching mathematics may come in that kind of context, since coming to China is a career change for me. I have come to teach English. However, it is pure joy for me to share with others how to teach mathematics effectively.
of mathematics, English, and American culture with people, as well as learn from my friends here about Chinese culture. Even though I have been here for a short time, I have to say that I love living in China. I love the people and the culture. After China, I plan to move to Kentucky to a retirement community where there are many people from China nearby, either having immigrated to the US to study or teach at universities. I would love to help Chinese people transition to life in America.
What else do you hope to achieve in China? And what are you plans after eight to ten years? While here in China, I hope to develop my Chinese language skills, make friends with Chinese people; strengthen my own personal walk with the Lord; and share my knowledge
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GUS: 10 HARVARD: ZERO It’s All About What You Think
Children develop into better thinkers in environments where it is clear that thinking is valued; where time is provided for thinking and therefore for increased awareness; where adults model thinking; and where opportunities for thinking are always sought. photos by kristina young
T
he words above might easily have come from a statement of the Glen Urquhart School philosophy. Surely, they reflect what students have experienced at GUS ever since the school was founded in 1977. Ahead of its time, Glen Urquhart promoted the need to take time to process information, to value the individual perceptions of different students, and to celebrate the many ways to express understanding.
None of that has changed. What has evolved, however, are new techniques and methodologies to help teachers unlock the many-faceted gifts of intelligence in students’ brains. Not surprisingly, the GUS administration and faculty have eagerly seized opportunities offered through Harvard University’s Project Zero (PZ) to enhance and augment what has always been the
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underlying philosophy at Glen Urquhart. So, the words on the previous page, that sound so GUS, are actually paraphrased from the PZ website. To date, ten GUS teachers and administrators have attended PZ workshops and come away revitalized and full of new ideas for the classroom. And many more, including Head of School Dave Provost and Upper School Head Gretchen Forsyth, are on deck to attend in the near future. Seventh grade teacher Sydney Clarke, who’s been at GUS since 1994, and fourth grade teacher Kathleen Bracken, who is celebrating her tenth year at the school, were the first to participate in PZ by attending a workshop on “visible thinking” — one aspect of Project Zero — at the International School of Amsterdam in 2011. “Hundreds of educators from around the world attended this conference with us. We made invaluable connections and learned from each other’s teaching methods,” recalls Sydney. “We also toured K–12 classrooms and saw examples of PZ work in action. Visible thinking really resonated
“PZ is changing the way we approach teaching. We allow students more time to process and reflect so that they get to think about where their thoughts are leading them, to go deeper, and to give us insight into what they are thinking and learning.”
– Kathleen Bracken
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with me. I recognized the throughlines between PZ and the GUS philosophy. At the same time, it broadened the scope of the techniques I could put to use immediately in my English class.” As a veteran GUS teacher, Sydney truly understands the underlying philosophy and methodologies of the school. “As our mission states, we’ve always asked kids to pose questions as often as they devise solutions. PZ is just another way to support teachers,” she says. “This is providing a rich discussion and teaching environment where students will feel inspired to do just that.” She is quick to point out that what PZ offers is not just a matter of connecting the dots. “PZ is not about drinking the kool-aid. Rather, it was an intense week that engaged teachers philosophically and practically as students, thinkers, and learners. There cannot be formulaic, building block teaching if we are asking students to deeply and genuinely explore questions such as how literature reflects what it means to be human and what makes writing good. This has to be authentic and spontaneous as well as thoughtfully crafted and planned.” Visible thinking, as Kathleen explains it, is the concept that children need time to process, time to view what other children are thinking, and time to reflect on the thinking of others and their own thinking. There are many strategies that help this process. Walking into the classrooms of teachers who have attended PZ, visitors see large pieces of paper with thoughts from students. The papers may stay up for weeks at a time, with the opportunity for the children to add new thoughts and to reflect on what is written by their peers and themselves. Another technique is reflection journals in which students sketch, pose questions, and answer
structured queries from their teachers such as What do you see? What do you think about it? What do you wonder about it? “This gives them a structure to think about what they are seeing,” Kathleen explains. There are 30 to 40 thinking strategies that teachers learn at PZ. “‘See/think/wonder’ is a great one when you visit museums,” says Kathleen. “Connect/extend/challenge,” another strategy, helps students connect information to what they already know and then extend their thinking in new directions. “A lot of it is putting routines in your classroom that could apply to any subject,” says Sydney, “and getting kids accustomed to these routines.” Teachers report that students enjoy the strategies and by mid-year start identifying the best one to employ to tackle an idea. For Kathleen, “the biggest eye opener was that kids are thinking lots of other things beyond what we are asking them. If we ask more openended questions, we will get to that. Otherwise, we just hear the answers to the questions we ask. That’s why we now ask them to draw, reflect, and brainstorm.” “There is already so much goodness at GUS that is in line with PZ. This gives it some new language and power to honor the past, but bring it forward.”
– Kitt Catlin
Kitt Catlin, in her third year teaching second grade at GUS, attended a PZ summer workshop in Cambridge in 2013. “It changed my overall approach to teaching,” she reports. “There were a lot of takeaways that I could implement immediately.” For her, as with others, “The biggest piece was the idea of slowing things down with students — going deep, reflecting, and revisiting.” With her seven-year-old students, she talks about meta-cognition and the concept that reading is thinking. She is always encouraging them to describe what they are thinking about what they are reading. “Curriculum is not just something teachers deliver,” she says. “It’s something we enact with our students. We bring it to life with them.” In her classroom, too, are large sheets of paper with thoughts and observations, examples of thinking routines such as Kathleen uses in her class. “See. Think. Wonder.” is also a favorite of Kitt’s. On one wall is a collaborative project about animal classifications. Students began with some guiding questions, then worked together to discuss, research, and conclude.
Courtney Rumbough Kelly ’01 and Marnie Potish, co-teachers in grade one, attended the PZ summer workshop. “It was amazing and overwhelming,” says Courtney. “I just keep one phrase in my mind now as I teach: ‘student thinking is the most important thing’; everything else falls beneath that.” Consequently, all her classroom plans are about process rather than end results. “I never want students to think there is a right or wrong way to think,” she says. As an example, she describes the thinking routine “Parts. Purpose. Complexity.” and the apple her class recently dissected. The children named all the apple’s parts, described them in detail, talked about the purpose the different parts might serve, and how the complex different aspects of the fruit might help a function or not. The students certainly had some prior knowledge but made new connections and sparked each other’s ideas. The students, Courtney says, were fully engaged in critical and imaginative thinking that might be applied to creations of their own at a later time. She recalls her own first grade experience with teacher Carol Stewart as also being focused on experience and process and is pleased to learn new methods from PZ for her own classroom. “Going to PZ made me feel very grateful to work at a place like GUS,” says Marnie. “A place that is open to these ideas. I realized that we are already using a lot of these strategies, but not using the terminology. Since ten teachers have gone to PZ, we have a common language for discussing this.” She concurs with Courtney that attending PZ has made student thinking paramount at GUS. “We do fewer activities so that deeper thinking can happen,” Marnie explains. Akin to that focus is the importance of different kinds of learning. Howard Gardner, the guru of multiple intelligences and an early director of PZ, was a keynote
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speaker when Marnie attended last summer. “I think about multiple intelligences often,” she says, “about expressing understanding through dance, drawing, and other means.” In the first grade, she and Courtney have their students create visual journals encouraged by written prompts such as “What makes somebody a good friend?” and “What does it feel like when you’re doing something you’re good at?” Unlike other professional development experiences, PZ “changes your whole perspective on what it means to be a teacher,” says Marnie. “It changes your perspective by providing a reflective component, which parallels your students’ process. At the PZ workshop, you explore the same thinking and practice the same methods of reflection that your students will do, including writing in journals.” Lower School Head Sarah Kotwicki attended the summer PZ workshop the year she arrived at GUS — 2013. As an administrator viewing children in many grades, Sarah takes the long view of the students’ education and what is most important to impart. “We are in this flurry of getting ready for Open House, for Grandfriends Day, etcetera, but we are trying to say to faculty, ‘let’s stop,’” she says. “Our job is to introduce children to concepts, to ideas; more than just teach them a fact, we are teaching them to be learners. The facts are important, but so many of the facts are just a click away. What we have to do is teach them what to do with the information. How do they make it have meaning for themselves? That is the premise of PZ. Kids have to make meaning of their learning in order for it to have value.” Lest this sound too unscholastic, Sarah is quick to point out that “we need to be academically rigorous to prepare kids, but we are also talking about seven and ten-year-olds who are going to be in school for a long time so we need to slow it down and look at what learning is all about. The
“This plays so well at GUS, and is a reminder of what we value. PZ takes us back to GUS roots but also offers innovative ways to differentiate, assess, and explore new and old concepts.”
– Sydney Clarke
difference here is that students are meaningful participants in their learning. It’s not happening to them, but with them.” Head of School Dave Provost plans to send more teachers each year and to send teachers back for more training. “The greater the cohort, the more meaningful and dynamic the conversation becomes when they return,” he explains. “The program gives us a common language and a common way to look at teaching and learning that is consistent with the mission and philosophy at GUS. The more people participate, the more meaningful the work gets.” Isn’t that the GUS way?
“With everything that I plan, I’m not thinking of the end result. I’m thinking about the process.”
– Courtney Rumbough Kelly ’01
PROJECT ZERO Project Zero is an educational research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education composed of multiple, independently-sponsored research projects. Since 1967, Project Zero has examined the development of learning process in children, adults, and organizations. Today, Project Zero’s work includes investigations into the nature of intelligence, understanding, thinking, creativity, ethics, and other essential aspects of human learning.
16 the tartan december 2014
SUMMER INSTITUTE: The Project Zero Classroom (PZC) is designed to help educators create classrooms, instructional materials, and out-of-school learning environments that promote students’ efforts to understand important content; recognize and develop students’ multiple intellectual strengths; encourage students to think critically and creatively; and assess student work in ways that further the learning. from Project Zero website www.pz.harvard.edu
TEACHERS ARE EVERYTHING. 2014–2015 ANNUAL FUND CAMPAIGN GIVE TO GUS AT GUS.ORG
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