How We Teach at Stone (Fall 2023 Letter To Parents from the Assistant Head of School)
Dear Stone Parents,
As I sit here in the sunset of summer, I am feeling immense gratitude for the opportunity to work at Stone. The seeds of Stone were planted over twenty years ago, though of course I didn’t know it at the time. As I look back over two decades of my writing, I see the whispers of what would grow into the educational philosophy that we embody here at Stone, a philosophy that would have remained simply on the pages of my journals and in my files, had it not been for Michael Simpson and his keen design and entrepreneurial skills, his indefatigable work ethic, and his clear vision. We are lucky to have such a dynamic leader at the helm, and I couldn’t ask for a better co-founder – I think it’s important to express gratitude regularly, so thank you, Michael Simpson, for everything you do for Stone.
Since Stone opened in 2017, Mike and I have been enormously lucky to work with curious and talented educators who have been integral to the educational design your children experience when they matriculate to Stone, and there is no way we would have grown the way we have without these fabulous teachers and mentors. As we moved out of “start-up” mode a few years ago, it was important to us to align Stone’s model across both divisions, across content areas, and both within and outside of the formal classroom. The growth of our experiential education program is evidence of that work; our STEM Honors program is evidence of that work; our student leadership programming is evidence of that work; the growth of our academic exhibition courses is evidence of that work; our graduates’ college success is evidence of that work – and it’s all because of our team.
I’m writing today to make sure the conversation about what our model is and how we use it to grow engaged and critically-thinking citizens is always active and dynamic. We’re always excited for formal discussions of our model like we have at Parents and Guardians Night, but it’s important that we are all having informal conversations too, conversations that help us all more deeply understand the important work we’re doing for the young people in our care, and that we are able to express to each other what is it we are choosing when we choose Stone.
There is no prescription nor purchased curriculum for what and how we teach. There are no step-by-step instructional guides or books. The collaborative work of our teaching team is what makes us who we are and allows us to show students the vast capacities they embody for highly sophisticated problem-solving. We practice and believe in an educational philosophy that we think is the best way to equip students for success in any future vocation, to use their voice for good, to engage life with empathy and ethicality as the road becomes more complex, to walk with a discerning and compassionate heart, and to solve the biggest economic, technical, environmental, and social problems that humans have ever faced.
As administrators, Mike and I routinely return to these guiding pillars for our educational model:
What is the evidence that we are changing students’ relationship to their work?
What is the evidence that we have clear “external packaging” of our educational experience?
What is the evidence that we are living our institutional values?
In short, we believe that learning – at the classroom level and at the institutional/professional level – is a process that is deserving of constant reflection and iteration.
Nehemiah J’s STEM Honors presentation.
It is important that as administrators we always view our work with that kind of big-picture perspective, but of course, when most people think of schools, they think of what happens at the classroom level. Practically speaking, Stone’s model rests under a large orientation to education called competency-based education (CBE). CBE is a framework for teaching and assessment based upon students demonstrating their proficiency and mastery of skill sets and content knowledge. In order to be successful in our program, students must show original evidence of learning and of applying concepts to new situations and increasingly complex challenges. Skills practice is recursive, and as students progress through our program, the expectations for expression of the skillset grow more sophisticated and more difficult; content also increases in difficulty. CBE is our philosophy of education/learning (i.e., it is what we believe to be true about how people learn best). Problem-based learning (PBL) is our pedagogical approach (i.e., it is how we teach). CBE is how we anchor our assessment. PBL is how we anchor our coursework. Problem-based learning provides an opportunity for students to grow in agency, voice, and mastery. It naturally leads teachers and students to an experience of deep learning, and that experience is empowering to students.
We also believe that a well-practiced entrepreneurial mindset applied to everything from a seventh grade book report to an advanced physics problem set or advanced chemistry investigation is one of the most important gifts we can give our students before they graduate. Problem-solvers with entrepreneurial mindsets are resourceful, resilient, and solutions-oriented. Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship urges that entrepreneurs “need to exist in government, they need to exist in big corporations, they need to exist in non-profits, [and] they need to exist in academic institutions. We need entrepreneurs everywhere.” At Stone, we require all students to take two Entrepreneurship courses, but we also expect students to apply an entrepreneurial mindset and design thinking approach to writing a thesis in English class, and tackling a multivariable calculus problem set, and completing a painting, and analyzing a monograph. The “fail forward” mantra at Stone and the resilient, solutions-oriented character trait it develops in a student is very much driven by our belief that all of our students need to weave an entrepreneurial mindset into their daily lives. It also helps us mentor students who become lifelong learners and curiosity-seekers, action-oriented adults who are involved with their communities and seek connection with the world around them.
The Class of 2024, “suiting-up” for Commencement.
We expect all of our students at Stone to graduate with demonstrated proficiency in the eight competencies that make up our Portrait of a Graduate (see attached); these eight competencies also inform the exciting Big Questions that are the cornerstone for the inquiry our students embark upon, that is, the problem they pursue, in all of their courses.
As a faculty body, we share student work to calibrate what successful skills expression looks like; we collaborate on skills design within content areas and also across content areas (as well as across divisions); we ask each other to offer feedback about our assessment design.
That good work thus far, and especially over the past two years, allows us now to begin a new process in the 2023-2024 school year: capturing benchmark skills proficiency over the course of a school year. So to do, I have asked each faculty member to administer an assessment to students during the first Cycle of Mod 1 that collects evidence about skills proficiency in the core skills of a course. These challenges will serve as a “pre-assessment” of the skills of our core courses, and in reality will not look very different from the assessments we typically ask students to do – the difference may be that they will be happening entirely within one class meeting time. We will reassess students mid-year, and again at the end of the school year – that part is new. These assessments are not graded, and will be used formatively (i.e., to collect information for use in future teaching and learning) to influence our curricular design and support for students, as well as to amass institutional data over time. I am writing just to let you know this is happening, in case your student mentions having an assessment during the first week of classes, and to invite you to ask any questions.
As ever, please do reach out. We are excited about formally capturing the tremendous growth we see in our students during a school year and across their six years with us. We have had very positive feedback about the work Stone is doing during our accreditation process; having historical data will give us even greater information about longitudinal trends in our work with students. To that end, thank you again for participating in our family engagement survey this summer. We will continue to send out similar surveys during the school year to solicit feedback and we would love to reach upwards of 90% participation in those surveys! More information to come later.
Finally, I want to make sure I express my purest gratitude for your partnership in educating and mentoring your children. It is an honor and a great responsibility to educate our future decision-makers and problem-solvers.
In partnership,
Abby Kirchner, Assistant Head of School