Morning Meeting – An Important Element of the School Day

Over the last several weeks, I have fistbumped, shaken hands, touched elbows, and made “hand hearts.”  I have corrected grammatical errors in welcoming messages, shared pictures and stories of my grandfathers’ military service, identified my favorite Thanksgiving dessert (anything with homemade whipped cream on it), and counted the days of the month, the year, and the week. I have also lost at rock-paper-scissors (six straight matches!), tied at quick-reacting body movement games, and been mystified during improvisation games.  

I have done all of this while spending time twice a week in various classrooms for Morning Meeting. Starting at the end of the critical first-six-weeks-of-school period when routines and relationships are developed, I will participate in Morning Meeting in every early childhood and lower school classroom by the middle of January. I have witnessed our teachers masterfully connecting with their students, creating and cultivating an atmosphere where the students feel known and safe enough with one another to be vulnerable and share of themselves. They do this all while sharing schedules, lunch menus, and other logistical news and while weaving in important foundational skills such as grammar, spelling, and math facts.  

Just as breakfast is often called the most important meal of the day, Morning Meeting sets the tone for the school day for our students, and much of their experiences and accomplishments stem from these important moments. Starting last week, I now have the opportunity and responsibility to set a similar tone for a group of students each morning: I am leading a group of 8th graders in “advisory” in support of a colleague who is out on maternity leave. While the opening moments of school for 8th graders look different than they do for our younger students, the feeling of setting the tone for the day in a safe, friendly, and connected environment is no less important, and I look forward to doing my best to create such an atmosphere for the nine 8th graders under my care. I just don’t think I will suggest a rock-paper-scissors tournament until I get a little better at it.

Giving Thanks

In this season of gratitude, I offer thanks to all of you who are a part of the NCCS community for all you do in teaching our students, in raising them, and in supporting our community to set the stage for our students to “live lives of impact and purpose” as they grow to happy, healthy 30-year olds.  With warm wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving, Gobble Gobble.  

Supporting Our Core Value of Community

Last week, we welcomed Country School trustee, noted child psychologist and Executive Director of the Sasco River Center, Dr. Chris Bogart, to campus to discuss “Belonging and Identity Development” with our parents and educators. For those unable to join, please find a link to the presentation here and below, an excerpt of my introductory remarks.

“Welcome. Thank you for coming.

Our goal today is to speak about child development through the lens of identity formation in the interest of fostering a sense of belonging in our students. I am delighted that Chris Bogart has joined us to lead this session today.  

Before I introduce him, I would like to share a few thoughts about our work in this area, which is sometimes called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and sometimes simply our work in support of our core value of community.

It starts with our foundational beliefs. Our school’s mission statement governs all that we do: We create an active, joyful learning environment where children are challenged to think deeply, question confidently, and act generously so that they may lead lives of impact and purpose.

Residing under that are several additional statements, including our vision for diversity, equity, and inclusion, which was adopted by the Board of Trustees’ long-standing DEI committee. It states: Our vision is to exist within a diverse environment in which every child and adult is seen authentically, their voices are heard, their contributions are valued and their growth enabled, resulting in everyone being empowered to do their best work and bring their full selves to the NCCS community every day.

This statement is meant to recognize our beliefs that:

• An educational community is strongest and most impactful for our students and their futures when it is diverse in every way;
• Such a community requires continual effort to cultivate, nurture, and maintain;
• Such effort revolves around the understanding of others and the building of empathy;
• There is much more that we hold in common with one another than is different; 
• The identification, understanding, and celebration of those similarities and differences is critical to the connection to one another and to the community that we seek to find in and for our students.

Most of all, and while this seems ever more challenging and perhaps even unattainable, the statement is also not meant to be political. Even as our society and political leaders seek to define most aspects of our beliefs and backgrounds as political, the vast majority of them are simply what make us human and who we are. It is true that our society has disproportionately placed value on various aspects of our identity over its history. Nevertheless, our religious beliefs, the color of our skin, our cultural upbringing and so much more, especially for our young students, are at their core facts to learn about one another that help us better understand one another and, ultimately, build connection with one another.  

That is our goal – to build a curriculum that teaches students the facts of various identities that exist, to create an environment of empathy and understanding, and to foster an ever stronger sense of community. We will not get it right every time, but we will continue to strive to build a curriculum where everyone knows that they are valued for every part of their being and that they feel they can bring their whole selves to school so that everyone thrives

Faculty Experiential Learning Enhances Our Students’ Education

Experiential Learning. This edu-speak buzz-word essentially means learning by doing – not from a book or the internet or someone else telling you something, but by actually having experiences. It is a hallmark of NCCS – think of Thacher students incubating eggs and raising chicks to learn about the life cycle, students from 3rd through 9th grade building with hand tools in woodshop, Middle Schoolers measuring the height of the flagpole in front of Grace House using shadows and similar triangles, and Upper Schoolers engaging with primary source texts in the course of research, among legions of other examples. As an old proverb states, tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand.

NCCS also values its teachers learning in this way. What better way to “pay it forward” and bring more authentic learning to students than to have experienced it yourself? Over the past several weeks, four teachers regaled us at Wednesday lunch with tales of their travels and learning this summer.  

• Jenn Thiemann, Lower School Music and Movement Teacher, traveled to Barcelona and Salzburg to learn directly from professional world music drummers and at the International Orff Institute, both of which are components of the Lower School music program. 
• Nika Skvir and Sanj Maliakal, 6th grade English and Middle/Upper School Science Teachers, respectively, traveled to the Amazon River Basin in Peru to study the biodiversity and culture of the area in addition to the impact of climate change on the area.   They will use their learning to further develop our life science curriculum and in support of the 6th grade speech unit, where multiple topics often revolve around climate change, endangered species, and the global water crisis.
• Elizabeth Carroll, Upper School Humanities Teacher, traveled to cultural, historical, and religious sites across India and Nepal in support of her Global Studies class. Imagine how much more powerful the learning will be for our students with their teachers having had these experiences.  

These experiences were partially funded by our “Special Professional Development” endowment. Established in 1991 by a school family, this Fund supports significant opportunities for NCCS teachers’ professional growth. As the language surrounding the Fund reads, “it is the specific intention of this Fund to encourage teachers and administrators to “dream” a little and pursue a variety of professional on- or off-campus activities that may otherwise fall beyond the scope of “normal” professional development experiences.” Such is the power of an endowed fund that it will continue to support multiple such experiences every year, as it has for the past 30. Imagine how many students have been impacted by the generosity of this family over the past three decades and how many will in the future; talk about “paying it forward!”

Apprentice Teachers Paving the Way to the Future of Education

At some point early each morning, I walk into the dining hall to get a cup of tea. One of the pleasures of this ritual is seeing some of our students who are here for Early Birds, and some of our teachers, particularly our Apprentice Teachers, who are supervising them. Some mornings, I stop and chat, and other mornings I listen in as I walk by, not wanting to interrupt the conversations. On mornings when I arrive before the students, sometimes I am fortunate enough to overhear conversations the Apprentices are having with one another. Most often, it is about their experiences in the classroom. They tell stories of lessons that they taught, of dynamics they are working through with the students, and other ideas they have about how to improve the student experience and student learning. I love hearing the commitment, the engagement, the reflection, and the growth that are all evident in those snippets. 

Particularly at a time in our country when fewer people are interested in teaching and some schools and districts are experiencing shortages of teachers, it is heartening to hear the way our Apprentice teachers are inspired – by their own values and priorities and by the experiences they are having here with our students and mentor teachers – to grow in the profession. 

In addition to the many Apprentice teachers who have remained at NCCS as lead teachers and administrators beyond their Apprentice years, I have run into several former Apprentices who now work elsewhere this fall. Two former Apprentices have come back this year to coach their current schools against NCCS and another former Apprentice was recently named Head of School-elect at the Whitby School in Greenwich. It is gratifying to hear the ways that our former Apprentice teachers’ experiences at NCCS are impacting students well beyond the corner of Ponus and Frogtown. Under the leadership of Lacey Ramsey, Director of the Apprentice Teacher Training Program, our Apprentice program continues to grow and thrive, creating experiences for our Apprentices both in the classroom and outside, in the form of a Professional Development series involving many teachers and leaders at Country School. As you may have seen, the families of two former teachers, Sue Speers and Pat Stoddard, have recently started a fund in their honor, the Speers-Stoddard Apprentice Teachers Fund, to support the continued growth and flourishing of our Apprentice Teacher Training Program, pointing that program to an even brighter future. You can read more about the fund here. Whether in their work with our students in the classroom, their formal Professional Development series, or in the informal ways I get to briefly observe while getting my morning cup of tea, I continue to be impressed with our Apprentice teachers, and with our program that supports them.