One of the most compelling pedagogical concepts I’ve ever come across is very simple: Don’t teach a vocabulary word until students already know the concept it describes. Let the experience you create be not, “Okay, there’s this word, and apparently it means X,” but, “Oh! That’s the word for that!” During the fall term, In science class,…
This past week, our school had to make a brief and abrupt shift to online learning for two days, and came back to in-person school on Thursday. All of my class already had some experience of remote learning, from last spring. But we did not know this class as an online community, and we found…
I’ve been thinking a lot about trust recently. It’s a quality that suffuses our school, and it makes a difference in so many ways, both big and small. At Chicago Friends School, students move independently around the school. Yesterday, I was watching over the indoor recess, and when my group changed from the gym to…
Right now, each student in our small 4th-grade class is making a map of a different continent. We’ve been making maps since the second week of school, starting small (mapping our classroom) and expanding our focus month by month. We’ve learned about maps, and now maps are our first step toward understanding continents and cultures…
At Chicago Friends School, we have very small class sizes. When people talk about small classes, the ability to customize instruction and provide individual students with teacher attention come up a lot. Those are important—part of the reason I wanted to teach here was that I wanted to be in a place where I would…
Chicago Friends School has a strong commitment to service, and it’s one of the things I love about the school. Our most recent service trip was to plant grasses at a new playground in Lincoln Park with the Lincoln Park Conservancy. Service beyond the school walls is great for the kids. To begin with, it…