Monthly Archives: February 2020

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Math Department Meeting #4, 2/25/20

Submitted by: Pat Higgiston

We started with a little math: a warm-up activity from Play With Your Math (#2, the Pentagram) and a brief discussion of this map of contemporary mathematics at Quanta magazine. Karima mentioned some students working (rather diligently and over a long time) on the app SUMAZE. It’s addicting, watch out!

Then Debra shared with us the continuing work in the Lower School of transitioning to the new TERC, and we discussed the possibility of using our fifth meeting time to do classroom visits to the Lower School. Especially since we will be losing the institutional knowledge that Debra represents at the end of this year, we are hoping to get a better sense of the student experience “upstream”, both in terms of mathematical concepts and pedagogical methods.

Finally, we took a look at the Anti-Bias Domains from our PD Day handouts (also found on Teaching Tolerance’s Social Justice Standards), and had an initial discussion of how these might apply to our work in math classrooms.

We discussed the way identity could be filtered through mathematics, and how it could be more intentional when promoting student on talking about their identity (and wondered briefly about identity as mathematicians). We discussed diversity in the context of the history of math and being intentional about writing problems in class. We discussed justice applied in certain LS math projects (crowd counting, food vendor project) and in addressing gender inequities in children’s discourse.

It’s a start!

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World Language Dept. mtg.

Submitted by: Adele

During this meeting we shared meaningful projects and resources that support and inform the teaching of oral skills throughout the divisions. It seems that projects and culture will drive our exploration of these oral skills. Music was a common thread because of its universal nature that sparked a comparison of  common songs and resources to illustrate content and curriculum.

We also talked about the need for better platforms where the students can record and share their oral projects with us and we will follow up with tech for some recommendations and ideas.

We ended by reviewing the M.S. trips and the academic work being done in preparation for these trips.

We will begin our next meeting at the L.S. to share student work. All of this in preparation for our day long retreat in the Spring to add to our existing document on how we teach oral skills.

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English Department Full-Day Writing Retreat 2020

Submitted by: Heather Brubaker

On Feb 24, the English Department met with Eve Becker at Teachers College for a full day Writing Retreat. Here were some of the goals of the retreat, from my correspondence with Eve:

  • Protecting substantial time during the day for individuals to write
  • Designing the workshop to work for everyone, whether or not they perceive themselves as writers or have an ongoing writing practice
  • Inviting work on whatever kind of writing feels meaningful: our own projects, writing about teaching, writing student models…
  • Opening space for feedback or sharing that will be low stakes, supportive, voluntary (not the classic workshop / critique model)
  • Emphasizing process and reflection

Eve ran a wonderful day that included some community writing in the morning, a “writing walk” through different spaces at TC, time for teachers to work on a writing project of their choices, a structured, voluntary share, and reflection at the end of the day. All of the exercises were “portable”; they were directly applicable and easily modified for use in a middle or high school classroom context. This was also a great community-building day, we learned about each other through our shared writing and thinking about writing. The department expressed a strong desire to continue working with Eve and to engage together as writers.

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Library Dept. mtg notes, Jan. 21 2020

Submitted by: Jennifer Hubert Swan

We decided not to meet on January 21 because we were all attending the NEIT conference for the next three days. While at NEIT, we checked in with each other and split our attendance at the unconferences in order to get the widest spread of information. The speaker that probably had the most impact for Library was Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, the executive director of the National Association of Media Literacy Education. We will be using the information from that talk and the organization’s website to inform our digital literacy curriculum moving forward.