The final day of this year’s NAIS conference began right at 8:00 am with the first of the day’s three workshops. Since the theme of the conference is innovation, I choose “Innovative Schools, Innovative Students” by Jonathon Martin, Head at St Gregory’s (AZ). I’ve enjoyed reading Jon’s blog and his posts to the Independent School listserve, and was excited to hear what he had to say about innovation. His presentation was essentially an overview of the concepts presented in some select recently published books on innovation, including Drive, Where Good Ideas Come From, and The Innovator’s DNA, which was useful from the standpoint of a data-dump on the concepts, but not in thinking about how these ideas are specifically applicable within schools. Unfortunately, as he ran short on time he accelerated the pace and volume of his speaking – choosing content coverage over depth.
For my next workshop I attended “Innovator’s Challenge Promotes Cross-Curricular Collaboration and Innovation”, presented by Penny Summers and Burn Jones of The Canterbury School (NC). They told the story of how they attempted to foster curriculum improvement through a specific project that arose from their leadership team’s shared reading of Curriculum 21 by Heidi Hayes Jacob (a book that has been on my reading list for some time). Listening to the narrative of the project was interesting, and I especially appreciated the constraints that they built into the project; that teachers work cross-disciplinarily with another teacher, that they connect with an outside organization, and that the project be considered within the context of the real work of the professionals in the field (biologists, writers, etc).
I had have a wonderful lunch conversation with Mary, Anne, and Mo Lan from The Trinity School in Menlo Park. I had been on their campus for a CAIS accreditation training in October, and Anne lives in Oakland and worked at both Bentley and Beacon previously, and we built on those connections to discuss a range of issues, from accreditation to enrollment to strategic thinking.
For the final workshop of the conference, I picked “Moving The Mountain: Changing Faculty Culture from Within” by Alice Moore at Marin Country Day School (CA) and David Colon at Collegiate School (VA). This workshop took a widely divergent pedagogic approach from the others, in that the presenters posed a series of questions to the audience, giving us time to talk in small groups and then report back our answers, before sharing some other considerations and moving on to the next question. I appreciated the attempt to provide a structure that would allow for active thinking and engagement, in contrast to most of the other workshops of the conference, though my hope for an increased understanding of, or even a few pragmatic nuggets about shifting faculty culture was not satisfied.
The conference’s closing general session featured Amy Chua, Yale Law School professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. After all the bad publicity her book had received, I was fully expecting to hear views that are widely divergent from my own, and thus was utterly shocked to hear how incredibly funny, self-deprecating, and thoughtful Amy actually was. Her perspective is far more complex than the media have depicted, and I found myself agreeing with many of the things she discussed, including the need to have high expectations for children, the importance of having them develop resiliency, the fact that genuine self-esteem comes from succeeding as a result of trying hard to do something challenging, the importance of balancing choice and freedom, and that happiness and success do not need to be mutually exclusive. Ultimately, her point is that Western parents have much to learn from Chinese parents, and vice-versa; that Chinese parents need to learn to nurture the whole child and cultivate the social and emotional lives of their children as well as the academic. In many ways, she was advocating for the exact sort of progressive education that we provide at TBS!
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