Weekly Message from Head of School 2023/3/4-2024/3/8
Dear Keystone Community,
Earlier this week I shared the exciting news with our faculty and staff that Keystone has been accepted as a member school of the Global Online Academy. This is quite an honor for us! This honor is a recognition of the global reputation of our excellent students and teachers and connects us to a network of some of the world's best schools.
Being a member school of GOA will allow our students (mostly 9th and 10th graders) to have access to extraordinary online courses that they can take with classmates from other excellent schools around the world. It also will be a source of inspiring professional development for our faculty. Our leaders will be planning to share more information about GOA and how to apply to sign up for courses in the coming months.
As I shared with my colleagues, I have a long history with the Global Online Academy which makes me even more excited that Keystone will now benefit from the amazing opportunities in this organization. As a teacher and world languages department leader in 2012, I was so excited to learn about the founding of the Global Online Academy. I ran to my principal’s office and offered to help in any way I could. He said that they were looking for teachers to volunteer to teach the first year of pilot courses. Being interested in technology, I was quick to agree to the challenge. Using Skype and other learning management systems that have fallen out of technological fashion, I joined 4 other teachers from across the United States. We meet weekly online and in person over our summer holiday to decide what the GOA’s definition of high-quality online learning would be (many years before online learning became ubiquitous in the Covid-19 pandemic) and agreed that our students would be at the center of these courses and relationships would be of the utmost importance.
In the semester-long Spanish classes I taught, I had a small group of students from across the globe. It was an advanced level Spanish course in which we learned about our various cultures through the literature and media study. I annoyed my family by skyping with the students in small groups and one on one in the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the evening to ensure that I could build connection and a sense of belonging in the learning environment. Each week with the other teachers we reflected on what was working and what wasn’t and worked to make our courses better and better.
Several years later, I did my doctoral research in the Global Online Academy, studying the relationship between student’s perception of their teacher’s care for them and learning outcomes—something that at that point had not been examined in an online environment. Later when I became a Principal, I joined the Global Online Academy Board to support the further development of the organization. The expertise in student-centered online learning allowed the Global Online Academy to play a huge role in supporting teachers and schools at the onset of the pandemic—scaling up their professional growth operations to contribute to the monumental effort of training an entire industry of education to try to do their jobs differently for a period—while still holding true their high educational expectations and student-centered values.
Now, many years since its founding, GOA is no longer the only organization offering excellent online courses, but it remains the top of human-centered and passion-based online learning experiences for independent and international schools globally. I am so excited that some of our students will benefit from these experiences, getting to learn alongside students from around the world.
In many ways, GOA’s growth is a parallel story to Keystone’s. It is an organization that was founded based on the belief that there is a way of learning that a small group of founders believed to have great meaning but wasn’t available anywhere else yet. I am excited to see where this partnership takes our school community in the future!
Wishing you all a peaceful weekend,
Emily
