Back To School Night 2020
This will be my last Back-to-School Night as Upper School Principal. As I look back on the previous years, I have fond memories of holding this event in the old building, then in the temporary structures we used when the new Upper School building was being constructed, then in our beautiful new building, and now over Zoom. Four different settings to accomplish the same goal: demonstrating to parents what we do and why they should feel confident about entrusting their child’s education with us.
As I take stock on 18 years in this role, what have I learned about Back-to-School Nights and, even more importantly, effective teaching strategies? So many things, and yet I feel like I can boil them down to three essential pieces. These are things I hope you will see and hear evidence of tonight as you meet your child’s teachers.
- Connecting with students and building relationships is essential. For this to be accomplished, it doesn’t matter if you are teaching in an overly hot, too-small room, or outside in the sculpture garden, or in the most technologically equipped classroom, or even from home over Zoom. Students need to feel safe, respected, and valued by their teachers. In turn, our students will reciprocate and give great effort. That two-way street is at the heart of our enterprise.
- Skill building matters more than content. Students are rarely going to remember specific aspects of the classes they take. They are going to absorb the life lessons and habits of mind that happen over the course of their time in the classroom. So when Mr. Thorpe asks students to read through ambiguity or when Ms. Jekel tries to get students to keep experimenting in the lab (even after their first few attempts have failed) or when Mr. Horsch asks his math students why they have a solved a problem in a particular way, these teachers are building critical thinking skills, perseverance, curiosity, and resilience. These are transferable skills that matter. Memorizing the periodic table or learning how to conjugate “to be” verbs have their place, but they are not the primary objective. Learning how to learn is more important than what you learn.
- Technology is only as good as the teacher in charge of it. It is a means to an end, not the end itself. Some of the best teachers use technology a lot, and some of them use it only a little. (See points 1 and 2 above.) This year all of our teachers have had to learn some new technological skills in order to work fully remote or in a hybrid fashion, but all the devices and fancy cameras are just good tools. We are fortunate to be a well-resourced school, yet our best resource is not the technological stuff but rather the humans using them.
I do hope you will see great examples of all of the above in action. The best compliment I can hear at the end of the evening is when parents say, “I wish I could take these classes and learn from these teachers.” Happily, I have heard that many times over the years.
A final additional point I can definitely make about good teaching and Back-to-School Night. I’m sure that you don’t really want to hear from me; you’d much rather get right to the teachers. So on with the program . . . and let’s make the 2020-2021 school year a memorable one, not just because of the pandemic, but because of the values this school lives through its mission to create curious, kind, courageous, and adventurous learners and leaders.
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