Sustaining a "Challenging and Relevant Curriculum"

One of our four "Core Beliefs" at Gaston Day School is sustaining a "challenging and relevant curriculum." According to our published goals, such a curriculum will "reflect the best educational theory and practice, entertain innovation, and prepare our middle and upper school students to compete successfully in local, regional, and national competitions." Sustaining such a curriculum is harder than it may seem. The trick is determining when innovation is going to spur better learning and when it is simply chasing after the latest educational fads. There are also practical challenges associated with educational reform. How much change is too much, and can we convince our students and, especially, our parents and, yes, our teachers that reforms and new practices are indeed beneficial? Change is hard and embracing educational reforms is difficult. But not embracing important change is dangerous and leads to stagnation and obsolete forms of learning. Choosing the right reforms and timing the pace of change are both essential.

I would like to point out two current examples of educational adaptation and reform at Gaston Day that I believe are exemplary. The first is from Lower School and involves technology education. In Mrs. Leslie Moss's 3rd Grade Computer Class, students are building upon knowledge gained last year when they learned binary codes and how computers store numbers, letters, and images (pixels) in
binary. Now they are actually programming.

This year the class began by taking a computer apart and learning about each component and its function. Next, the class began an online course in which third graders learned to type Python code. For those of you who are not tech geeks (like me), Python is an interpreted high-level programming language for general purpose programming. As part of the 3rd graders' work with Python, they have learned about syntax, objects, functions, while true loops, strings and variables. The 3rd graders love it! This semester they will move to the next level online course and then the third and highest level. In speaking to one of the consultants for the online courses, Mrs. Moss learned that when our 3rd graders complete the third online course in programming, they will have covered the same material that Stanford University offers in its Introduction to Computer Science Course. Wow! This is remarkable learning!

In Middle and Upper Schools, learning is just as progressive. Two years ago, the GDS faculty wrote "The Portrait of a Graduate" to identify what skills and traits we wanted our students to have when they left here. We are now using "The Portrait of a Graduate" to develop a series of grading rubrics that focus on soft skills and not just mastery of content. These soft skills include collaboration, creativity, resiliency, and problem solving. These new grading rubrics join those we have already developed in the past for presentation skills. Head of Middle and Upper School, Kim Perlman, reports that she regularly has outsiders from conferences, seminars, and programs call her to commend us on our students' presentation skills. Just imagine how well Gaston Day graduates are going to be prepared for college when we strengthen all these other soft skills like collaboration, creativity, resiliency, and problem solving to their tool bag.

I hope you are as excited as we are about the way in which Gaston Day School is offering a challenging and relevant curriculum for our students. Please let me know what you think and how we can do it better.