Our Wildwood, Volume 50

Elementary Science Teacher Sam Palm-Shindell and 3rd grade students explore how bird beaks have adapted based on their habitats.

stimulating and hopeful. I remember being exposed to a range of ideas and concepts, and being expected to explore, discuss, debate, defend, and conclude which constructs would best inform my own teaching. One professor, Dr. Susan Lytle, explored with us the pros and cons of Ebonics as a way to engage and connect with our predominantly African-American students in West Philadelphia; another guided us to search for texts with which our students could connect, pulling from them weekly spelling and vocabulary lists. It all felt so novel to me, having spent 13 years in a desk in a row, memorizing, regurgitating, and moving on. A year or so later, as a young teacher, I met with direct pushback to those ideas. Teaching in a socio economically and racially diverse rural school outside of Philadelphia, I’d decided to use an Amy Tan short story I thought my 8th graders would enjoy; I eschewed the mindless, dull, outdated stories present in the set of textbooks I’d been given at the start of the year. I remember clearly the day that my principal asked me to meet with him at the end of a school day. A parent had called into question whether or not I was following the school’s curriculum, since I was teaching a short story outside of the approved textbook and written by a woman of color. My wonderful principal talked through it all with me. He affirmed his support in my practices, yet it was also clear that he was running interference for me; and I knew that it wasn’t going to be the school for me longer term. Graduate school had introduced me to a range of modalities, and—at heart—an orientation to how I think about the work we do with kids, and there was no going back. What Does Progressive Mean? There’s no one definition of progressive education. In the context of Wildwood School, I’ve come to describe it as our commitment to an evolving pedagogy based on research and experience. There are timeless methods for engaging students as learners, which we continue to use, simply because they work. At some point, however, they were all new. They were someone’s version of trial and error, a teacher reflecting on what was and wasn’t working and then trying something else. Brain science has significantly impacted that trial-and-error, informing what gets tried in the first place.

Arriving at Wildwood the better part of two decades ago, I quickly recognized in our elementary language arts programming elements of the “whole language” approach that I was exposed to in graduate school. Students learn to read, write, listen, and speak in integrated ways. Math, science, history—all of it—function in similar ways, providing context so that students will rarely be tempted to pause and ask, “Why do I need to know this..?” Elementary felt then—and feels even more so now—like the perfect blend of constructivist principles with what we have now come to know as mastery based learning. Structures at the middle and upper program, introduced just a few years before I arrived, were informed by the Ten Common Principles promoted by the Coalition of Essential Schools. The Coalition, which served its purpose of inspiring schools around the world to think about what students would need in the 21st century, was founded in the mid-1980s. The Coalition’s work was based largely on the work of Ted Sizer, the founder. Sizer wrote, “Very few high schools ever give their students a clear long-term academic goal and an equally clear signal that it’s the student’s responsibility to get there.” Sizer consulted on the idea that eventually became Wildwood School, and his influence is embedded in all that we do.

OWW WINTER 2024

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