Our Wildwood, Volume 53

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25! K-12

FEATURE Celebrating 25 Years of K-12

Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach has been a defining practice since the founding of the middle and upper school.

SOLID FOUNDATIONS Because John Dewey’s progressive model for education focused on children, the founders of the middle and upper school had to explore other models that understood the developmental needs of adolescents. Their research led them to Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools. Sizer’s work shaped the middle and upper school, especially the Coalition of Essential Schools’ 10 Common Principles, including: less is more, depth over coverage; student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach; demonstration of mastery; a tone of decency and trust; and democracy and equity. Those principles also inspired a framework for the middle and upper school that included: Habits of Mind and Heart, Advisory, project-based learning, and the self reflective work of student-led conferences (which now begin as student-involved conferences at the elementary campus), and Gateways and Senior Exhibitions. Of course, SEL and DEIB were woven throughout the program, just as they were at the elementary level. As a teacher, Corey takes inspiration from her own high school teachers, those pioneers who were teaching in temporary spaces until the campus was completed in 2003. “I have nothing but praise for the teachers who started off the school with us. I really admire them as educators, and I am so privileged that some of them have now become my colleagues,” she said. “My teachers were always really explicit about what we were doing, why we were doing it, the pedagogical rationale behind it, and so it made it very transparent and gave me something to model when I became a teacher.” EVOLVING PRACTICES While many of Wildwood’s programs from that original framework are still in place a quarter of a century later, including standards-based assessment and mastery learning, all of them have evolved in light of learning science research. Moreover, K-12 coordination of all elements of the program has sought to create a seamless experience for students beginning in kindergarten and continuing through graduation. Some innovations over the past 25 years include the International Community Involvement trips, which have taken hundreds of students to eight countries since 2005 to work with humanitarian organizations and teach in

local schools, and Global Citizenship programming guided by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. These programs led Wildwood to be accredited by the Council of International Schools in 2018. Other examples of creative programming include the Institutes at Wildwood and Systems Thinking. In addition, DEIB programming really ramped up with the hiring of Wildwood’s first official diversity practitioner in 2001 and the implementation of the DEIB Curriculum Scope and Sequence. THE INSTITUTES AT WILDWOOD When the Board asked all the school directors to present new ideas, Lori Strauss, who was then director of the upper school, and now head of school at The Field School in Washington, D.C., shared her vision for what would become the Institutes. “These would be models where students would join in real world work that did not end with their graduation, or was not limited by years of typical school time, but instead would be ongoing,” Lori said. “Students would work in teams and partner with outside constituencies from year to year to make impact, either sustainable change or develop something new for a local or national community.” Students and faculty collaborated on determining the topics of these institutes and developing a curriculum that was largely based in skills acquisition around problem-solving. The Wildwood Institute for STEM Research and Development (WISRD) launched in 2014.

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