• Curriculum Overview
• Afternoons
• Events and Celebrations
• Service Learning and Partnerships
• Special Assemblies
• Mini Courses

By Dana Marcus
Director of Admissions and Communications

The staff returned from Winter Break for the most part well-rested for our January 2nd Staff Development Day. We enjoyed spending time over the break with immediate and extended family, catching up on reading and baking, sleeping late, watching movies, playing games and eating too much. Sound familiar? Some of us took trips to places as close as Shamokin or as far reaching as Ohio, Vermont, and even Germany (Nita).

We spent the first part of the morning reviewing the Program Initiatives we outlined for ourselves for the 2006-07 school year. At our Staff Development Day in September, we continued our work from last year on defining and refining our core vales and discussing what our shared teaching methods and best practices are as a staff. This work will be synthesized by the Program Team (Carlye, Lauren and Anu) and the final version will be used as a guide to create staff development plans for the next few years.

The shared practices we are focusing on for the rest of this school year are: backwards design (a process for designing curriculum using built in methods of assessment); collaboration (Our new cycling schedule requires us to be expert collaborators. We will explore different models of collaboration to learn more about it in both theory and practice.); and continuing the curriculum mapping we've been doing for the past few years (Curriculum mapping is a tool used to document our current working curricula across grades and disciplines so that we are making data driven decisions about students' learning, the schedule, and consistency between and among grades.).

In addition, we are doing ongoing work on several parts of the curriculum including but not limited to spelling, social studies and service and partnership learning, math and science. Over the next few months, we are implementing a new spelling curriculum which combines the work of educators Diana Snowball, Cindy Marten and Faye Bolton. Our goal is to use the curriculum for the remainder of the year, reflect on it, and to create a plan for using it next year.

Our second specials cycling session will include service and partnership learning partnerships that have a social studies focus. This will provide the staff with an opportunity to have conversations and reflections on how and where service and partnership learning and multiculturalism fit into our program and practices.

The National Council for Teachers of Mathematics has recently developed new recommendations for math. The result will be fewer (that's right!) and more focused standards. Currently, there are no purchasable curricula developed that reflect these new standards and meet our progressive pedagogy. Within the next two years, new curricula nationwide will be written that will meet our requirements. In the meantime, we are reviewing our current curriculum and narrowing its focus to the recommended focal points. Additionally, we are gathering more resources to supplement the Investigations materials that we currently use (check out Lauren's office, it looks like a mini math laboratory). We will convene small teacher groups to help support this work.

The Program Team in partnership with several teachers will add a sustainability section to our science curriculum that will include the work our students do in the garden and on campus. This will be added to the science curriculum by the end of 2007.

Much of this work will take place during our weekly Wednesday afternoon staff meetings, during separate teacher and administrator committee meetings (Program Team, Leadership Teams, Agenda Committee), our May Staff Development Day, our end of year Staff meetings and into the summer. We will also spend time reflecting on and evaluating the effectiveness of our new cycling schedule, our new preschool curriculum and of course, the initiatives above. If you have questions about any of the ways we are working on the educational program, please don't hesitate to ask a teacher or administrator at any time.