Weekly Message from Head of School 2023/03/19-2023/03/25
Dear Keystone Community,
The pace and rhythm of school life is quickening. In the past few months, we have gone from doing our best to create approximations of what we had previously described as a vibrant school community, to weeks like this one in which there are so many events and experiences that it is impossible to even know about them all! For families of residential students, this weekend might be a little quieter as the boarders enjoy an action-packed weekend of activities on our second “closed weekend” of the year. In other exciting news this week, the Primary School production of Dinosaurs after Dark (with one more show this weekend!) opened on Thursday to the delight of huge crowds in the packed Hutong Theater. It is a sweet story of adventure and the magic of combining knowledge (or book smarts) with warm curiosity and wonder. Congratulations and thank you to the teachers and the cast and crew!
In a similar spirit of warm curiosity and wonder, last Friday school was closed to students and our employees enjoyed a day of professional growth (PG). Keystone schedules more than a week of professional growth (including an intensive orientation) for our employees every year. Like all excellent schools, we believe that the growth and learning of our adult community members has a direct and positive effect on the excellence of the learning opportunities offered to our students.
Educators, like all professionals, must keep learning to remain up to date with the latest advances in their field. In education, this means familiarity with a variety of areas such as neuroscience, educational and child psychology, advances in curriculum and instruction, not to mention individual and community health, nutrition, technology and educational philosophy.
This can be overwhelming in a profession in which burnout and stress have been at record highs even before the last few complicated years of the global pandemic. And even with all that responsibility and all there is to learn, teachers at Keystone delight in their professional growth. Every week there are many new learning environments our teachers are taking advantage of: from local, national and global conferences to courses and programs in person and online, our teachers love to learn! They are curious lifelong learners, a fact which contributes so much to the excellence of our learning environments for students. It takes a not so small army of highly expert educators to make a remarkable school like Keystone work so well.
On this PG Day, teachers all gathered to focus on the important concept of “inquiry” in learning. A wonderful facilitator guided by members of the school leadership team created an experience for teachers to be reminded of the power of asking questions to lead to learning. Inquiry learning is a framework in which a teacher makes space for students’ questions to shape a pursuit of knowledge and understanding. It increases engagement and improves outcomes. And it takes high levels of skill to successfully execute classrooms guided by inquiry learning.
In mixed groups teachers learned with colleagues from across campus that they don’t often get to work with, deepening opportunities for making new connections, and strengthening our faculty community. In the afternoon, teachers thought carefully about the role of inquiry in their own classrooms and how they might transfer the learning to the benefit of their students. Meanwhile, our non-teaching staff had their own shared learning experiences including a large creative domino art project that gave them the opportunity to practice the skills of collaboration, persistence, communication and enjoy the beauty of a shared endeavor.
Throughout the day, we were all reminded of the incredible power of joy in learning. As educators, reconnecting to this joy and our professional community was a booster shot for our ongoing work with our students. It is important that Keystone devote itself to the learning of our adult community members with the same passion that we bring to student learning. We all enjoy the fruits of their commitment every day. For adults, this commitment to our own learning cultivates a sense of individual and shared purpose, delight, professional satisfaction. For the students, this commitment to adult learning results in magical and life changing moments—like watching a neon-colored parade of child-sized dinosaurs.
Warmly,
Emily
