Weekly Message from Head of School 2023/2/28-2024/3/2

Dear Keystonians, 

This week as we happily re-adjusted to the school schedule, and strolled through our beautiful archway, we were greeted by a stunning new installation showcasing the faces of our youngest primary school students alongside art pieces of the great masters. What a joy to gaze upon these side-by-side comparisons of great works of art history replicated in photos featuring our beautiful Foundation students. They are adorable, warm and engaging-- drawing us in. 

Engagement is an important concept in education and great teachers design for all three dimensions of engagement—behavioral, emotional (or affective) and cognitive. These three dimensions are described in educational research and challenge teachers to design learning environments for cognitive engagement which predicts the most enduring and transferable levels of learning—learning that lasts and can be used in new situations. Most cognitive engagement builds on behavioral and emotional as foundations for that highest order of engagement.  

Behavioral engagement can be observed when learners are following directions—doing their work, listening to the teacher, and going through the motions. Behavioral engagement is necessary in a classroom context, but it is not sufficient for deep learning. You can be behaviorally engaged and not learn a thing. For there to be deep learning we also need to connect to our emotions, we need to feel something about the thing we are learning. 

Back to the installation in the archway this week: you can’t look at those photos and not feel behaviorally engaged—they are adorable, and few people have walked through the archway this week without looking up. Beyond the first glance, that feeling of excitement when you see a photo of your student and enthusiastically point: Hey, our precious students! Hey—I know him!  Hey, look at her! The whole installation is a recipe for affective or emotional engagement, the feeling of being connected to the experience. 

With emotional engagement, the likelihood of deep learning increases, but it is when cognitive engagement is unlocked that the proverbial sparks of learning really start to fly. Cognitive engagement is when learners are psychologically invested in the actual mental work of learning.  The sparks of cognitive engagement were also flying in the archway this week! 

At one point this week, I ran into a foundation class—students were energetically buzzing around the archway-- bundled against the late winter chill with clipboards around their necks engaged in an expertly designed math assignment. They were counting the frequency of different great works throughout the installation. You could observe their cognitive engagement as they clutched their pencils with cold hands, running to be sure they captured every piece of data that they needed to complete the task. It was brilliant. Of course, their teachers could have decided to stay in the classroom and teach the mathematical concepts in a more traditional way, but they would have missed the opportunity to tap into these increasing levels of engagement and unlock the deep learning that emerges from cognitive engagement. Cognitive engagement is an accelerant to deep learning. With cognitive engagement you can learn more, more quickly than just relying on behavioral engagement to drive the learning. 

These efforts to expertly engage students for deep learning are pervasive at Keystone. Another beautiful example of this can be reviewed in the stunning video about our 10th grader’s personal projects that was released today on our school’s official WeChat. This video provides ample examples of the learning that comes from being deeply cognitively engaged. 

For all this engagement we see on campus, we have our amazing teachers to thank. It is hard work to design for deep learning, but the rewards are huge. I enter this first weekend of March with continued admiration and gratitude for their unwavering brilliance and commitment to what is best for our students. 

Yours truly, 

Emily