Campus Voices
All School
Coming up on February 19 is a professional day for the faculty and staff at School. While students think of it as a day off, parents sometimes wonder why time devoted to professional development of the faculty is so important, why it merits time away from classes, and what impact, if any, it has on the experience of their child. Why do we take time out of the academic calendar for a “professional day?” The answer to that is very simple: professional development for faculty leads to better programming and experiences for our students. Put more directly, great schools invest in their faculty. One of the most powerful and transformative investments BB&N can make is to encourage and support faculty to develop curricula in their fields of expertise, grapple with how best to address current needs of our students, and proactively prepare them for the future.
Many parents and alumni/ae are surprised to hear that new programming at BB&N frequently starts with a professional development grant, and that the majority of projects the School funds result in direct classroom applications. Take, for example, the group work done with a grant last summer by an Upper School mathematics team. Knowing that statistics is becoming an increasingly important area of math, that team worked on integrating statistical concepts and units into all of our math courses. The result is something they call SAC: Statistics Across the Curriculum. With this program in place, all students who graduate from BB&N will have a working knowledge of the general statistical ideas.
Another stunning example of the impact that professional development has on curriculum is the eighth grade radio essay project. This project, the creation of teacher Rachel Jamison, came out of work she was doing towards her master’s degree. This innovative unit on media literacy has each student write and produce, complete with a sound track suitable for broadcast radio, an essay on a topic of personal importance. Not only do students write and read their essays, but they also explore how to influence tone and mood of an audio piece. To produce the final product, they work both independently and collaboratively with each other.
Media literacy is something educators around the nation are wrestling with; aware of the power and subtleties of message making, teachers look to teach both decoding and encoding skills in “new”, non-print media. Another example of how faculty have thought about and responded to this challenge can be found in the ways LS teacher Anne Mackay applied a professional development project to her classroom teaching. Mrs. Mackay has integrated i-movies into the curriculum at the beginner, kindergarten and first grade level. Beginners created a “news broadcast” from space to review information acquired during their study of space; Kindergarteners participated in a digital storytelling experience, summarizing and reenacting several African folktales; and first-graders created a “game show” to review phonetic skills and sight words. Not only were these i-movie projects a lot of fun but they also encouraged the use of several modalities to build a sense of story and increase the oral fluency and dramatic skills of young readers.
On February 19, BB&N’s faculty will gather for a different sort of professional development opportunity. We have reserved that day for presentation and discussion of the work done by Dr. Lisa Gonsalves, U Mass professor and researcher for the achievement study sponsored by the E.E. Ford Foundation grant. There is no doubt that this important day is the first step in a process that will—over the course of the next few years—lead to a series of conversations within the faculty and, ultimately, to changes in some of our programs. Curricular and program change at BB&N is a dynamic process, one that is usually rooted in the professional development of dedicated teachers.
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