Volume: 1 Issue: 1 Winter 2019 ................................. SHS Home  |  Alumni Page  |  Reunion 2019

Welcome to Shady Hill's Inaugural Issue

A Place to Belong  is   a periodic e-newsletter for SHS alumni, brought to you by the Communications Office in collaboration with the Alumni Board.  A Place to Belong  will supplement the print magazine and arrive in your inbox twice a year, winter and summer. You will see that the School of today is vibrant and innovative while continuing to embrace the mission and traditions you hold so dear.   Happy reading!   The Communications Office and the Alumni Board

Sixth Graders Practice the Fine Art of Storytelling

Back for his 23 rd  year, acclaimed storyteller, puppeteer, and musician Willie Claflin recently spent a week at Shady Hill. He divided his time between one-off visits to classrooms and weeklong student workshops. In one of his workshops this year, he taught storytelling skills to sixth graders.   Each student in VI Humphrey, Rivas, and Sen performed an African creation story—either an existing one or a tale they wrote inspired by a traditional one. In preparation for presenting the stories to partner classes, Willie coached students in their use of voice, gesture, imagery, and story sequencing to bring the stories to life and to heighten the impact of each performance.   Students in VI Hesko created a class play. Their inspiration was an assortment of fantastic, glow-in-the-dark African animals constructed for the SHS Fair’s Fun House, kindly donated by the Parents Council and Fun House crew. The class examined the structure of African folktales—repetition, predicaments, larger-than-life characters—and wrote an original play featuring the Fun House creatures. Willie helped students develop a narrative thread and use intonation, gesture, and dialog to heighten the characters’ personalities and support the story. The class performed the play four times for various audiences.

Seventh Graders Explore Exploring

“Four centuries ago, the English didn’t discover a New World—they created one.” From  America, Found and Lost  by Charles C. Mann   This fall, seventh graders have examined the colonization of the Americas. Each student has spent weeks carefully researching a particular aspect of European colonization and has pulled the learning together in a research paper and a display. At their  Mundus Novus  showcase, students exhibited the posters and dioramas they had made to shed light on a particular facet of the “new world” exploration and settlement.

To underscore the role that readily available books played in disseminating knowledge during the Age of Exploration, seventh-grader Connor Quigley constructed a working Gutenberg Press.

Expanding Affinity Opportunities for Students

Shady Hill has long supported affinity based programming that provides students opportunity to connect around a shared identity. As an extension of our current affinity and alliance based programming - and in response to student request, we are delighted to offer expanded opportunities for students to gather in different and more specific identity groups during our normal assembly period.   These dynamic “gatherings” - which will occur during four middle-school assembly times this year - allow students time to connect in new configurations along with SHS adults who share those identities. As is always the case with our affinity programming, student participation is completely optional and voluntary. Students may choose to attend any Gathering that they identify with and may choose to attend a different Gathering next time.   We are proud to offer this opportunity for students to share their experiences with one another and get to know each other better!

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Great Fall Sports Season

On behalf of the Athletic Department, we want to congratulate all of our student-athletes and coaches on a fantastic fall sports season. The hard work, drive to improve, commitment to team, good sportsmanship, and healthy competition were on full display throughout the season. On the field and race course, personal and team goals were established, met, and in many cases exceeded. Thank you to the entire community for your support of the program, and we look forward to the winter season, which is right around the corner.     Melissa Carver   Director of Athletics and Physical Education                    GO STINGERS!   Click on these links to take a look at our athletes in action this fall:     Cross Country Field Hockey Flag Football Flag Football-JV Soccer--Boys Program Soccer--Girls Program

Deconstructing Dominant White Culture

Dr. Robin DiAngelo (author of NYT best-seller,  White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism ) was the featured speaker at the October DASH-Parent Council event. Robin spoke about the importance of white people developing white racial literacy. “Growing up,” she began, “no one ever conveyed to me the message that I lost anything of value by living a segregated life. Being raised in a dominant culture,” she continued, “is to be raised racially illiterate. When swimming with the current, it’s easy not to notice it.”   Robin used the metaphor of a dock for how dominant culture works. From the shore, one sees just the surface appearance of planks above the water. Whiteness has a similar surface appearance, created by movies, magazines, TV, beauty contests, legislative halls of power, society pages, corporate boardrooms, and the like, But like the dock, the dominant white culture depends on an interrelated network of financial, legislative, legal, media, and cultural pillars. These pillars, together with the perception of the white ideal as the norm, produces a self-sustaining system of white supremacy.   “White supremacy,” Robin clarified, “is the system we live in where whites have opportunity, choice, influential social networks, freedom of movement, and decision-making power. Seen this way, racism is a system, not an event.”   Robin shared a series of statistics on the country’s political, financial, media, and corporate power brokers and decision makers. The people controlling these levers of power were almost exclusively white men. Addressing how things change, Robin gave two striking examples—the women’s vote and Jackie Robinson. In each case, it was those in power who had to be compelled to grant others new privileges rather than these groups bestowing rights on themselves. Men “gave” women the right to vote and owners “let” Jackie Robinson play baseball. This runs counter to the popular narrative of women “winning” the right to vote and Jackie Robinson “earning” a spot on the roster.   This is the essence of Robin’s message on ending racism—since change in racist attitudes and policies is in the hands of the white dominant culture, it is essential that whites understand their racial identity and the way that white power and privilege work in our society. “If one can’t understand what it means to be white then one can’t understand what it means  NOT  to be white.”   She concluded the evening outlining an anti-racist framework and offering a list of things white people can do to help break the cycles of white supremacy. “The first challenge is humility—the learning never ends.”   In his remarks, Mark Stanek pointed out that this work is a work in progress and not a box to check off. “White people need to commit to eradicating racism, understanding privilege, building cross-racial alliances, and interrupting systems of power, privilege, and racism.

What Motivates Children? Mark Stanek Shares Research Insights

Head of School Mark Stanek opened the year’s  Let’s Talk: Head of School  series with a discussion focused on children’s motivation.   Mark shared research which showed that as students advance in school, there is a measurable drop-off in motivation. He said, “I don’t feel this is the case at Shady Hill. Our mission is to support active, joyful learning, and I think we deliver on that. The research,” he said, “shows that motivation increases when students understand the how and why behind their learning and is enhanced when students can relate the learning to themselves. Purposeful, relevant learning boosts motivation as does a sense of autonomy, which helps invest students in the learning process.”   “I often hear alumni speak about how Shady Hill gave them a sense of purpose. They were given opportunities to explore possibilities and experience new things while also seeing the connectedness of their learning. It’s not unusual to hear them say that the education they've received here was the best schooling they ever had. And this is from people who attended very prestigious schools!”   Mark also discussed the idea of fixed and growth mindsets as they relate to motivation and to the chemicals released in the brain when one experiences success. As adults, we can model a growth mindset by being willing to take risks, sharing stories about times we tried and failed, encouraging a child’s effort, and praising the process rather than the end product.

Fifth Graders Explore Boston George Washington on a horse? A Chinese herbalist shop? Someone selling balloons? Fifth graders were on a quest to locate and take pictures of these and 70 items like them. The list created by the Grade V teachers included fun challenges as well, such as pictures of:   Hanging upside down somewhere Doing exactly what a sign says Acting like robots “I can’t believe we all fit in here!”  Over the course of the day, 11 groups of four to six students (plus chaperones) roamed the Boston Common, Public Garden, Chinatown, and spots in between. The scavenger hunt is an important team-building experience for these freshly minted middle schoolers. By problem-solving and having fun together, students in these cross-section groups get to know each other in new ways. This week’s trip expands the team-building work these groups have been doing in the Hub’s makerspace—engineering the tallest structure possible out of spaghetti, marshmallows, string, and tape.

Pam Dickinson Launches Admission, Advancement, & Communications Initiatives

I am delighted to begin my first full school year as the Director of External Relations and Strategic Engagement, a new office at Shady Hill. Since I began in May, there hasn’t been a dull moment with new initiatives underway in the three offices I oversee—Admission, Advancement, and Communications. Having spent the last decade of my life working in schools and nonprofits dedicated to social justice, I am thrilled to bring the community-building, communications, and fundraising skills I have developed back to Shady Hill, a place I love dearly. It’s also a place I know well. I was an involved parent when my four daughters went here, and I served on the Board for six years.   So, what are these three departments working on? In Advancement, I spent much of the summer hiring a full staff of gracious, experienced, hard-working team players who are eager to learn about our community and help build a strong spirit of belonging and philanthropy among us. In Admission, we are looking at long-term trends in the local school landscape, and to that end, I am chairing the Board’s new Enrollment Task Force. In Communications, we are making sure that the image we project fully reflects all that we offer to students, families, faculty, and apprentices.

First Graders Tackle Eating on the Space Station Gravity is our friend when eating a meal on Earth. Food stays on the plate. Drinks stay in the cup. Friends and family stay in their seats. But in the microgravity of space, food and drink have a tendency to float away. Grade I South to the rescue!   Their challenge was to design containers that would enable astronauts to eat and drink in space. To kick things off, the first graders watched several NASA videos, showing what it takes to eat, drink, or make a sandwich in space. For example, they saw astronaut Jack Fisher eating pudding on the International Space Station by squirting globs into the air and then sneaking up on and gobbling down the floating pudding balls.   Then students designed and built containers that would prevent things from floating away while still providing convenient access for eating. “Remember,” said makerspace assistant manager Francesco Cupolo, “no eating in the Hub. Use the materials to experiment. But no food or materials go in your mouth, like the straws!” The budding engineers chose either Cheerios, pudding, or water as the astronaut meal and set to designing a suitable container.

Science & Makerspace Teacher Barbara Bratzel Runs Robotics Workshops in India

Shady Hill has a long tradition of disseminating its project-based and creative approach to teaching. In September, science teacher and Makerspace manager Barbara Bratzel was invited to lead workshops at LEGO Engineering conferences in Chennai and Bengaluru, India. The theme was  Driving Innovation in India through STEM Education . In each city, Barbara gave a keynote address to the attendees, who also participated in LEGO robotics workshops that she designed. Registration for each conference was capped at 100 participants. But in both cities, teachers shut out of registration came anyway, leading to very busy workshops!   Through her talks and workshops in the US and abroad as well as through her robotics activity books for teachers, Barbara works to help educators shift to a more open-ended, project-based approach to STEM. Compared to more traditional step-by-step methods, this approach leads to greater engagement and a deeper understanding of the concepts. The teachers at the workshops in India were interested in moving from a regimented, exam-based approach to education to one that embraces more creative problem-solving. Open-ended challenges, hands-on projects, and team-based collaboration are integral to this approach. The educators attending these conferences were particularly interested in how to embed physics concepts in robotics activities and how to assess open-ended projects. These were the first LEGO Engineering conferences in India; the hope is to hold additional ones in other Indian cities in the future.   In selecting challenges for the workshops, Barbara drew from the physics and robotics courses that she teaches at Shady Hill. For example, conference attendees designed their own simple robotic cars. Then they attached motors, sensors, and pens and programmed the cars to draw a variety of designs. In another workshop, the teachers explored data logging, an application of LEGO robotics that was new to them.   Barbara reports that her work with other educators feeds back into her teaching here. For example, one of the Indian teachers emailed her after the conference to share an extension of the drawing-robot activity. She had her young students attach markers to BeeBots (programmable robots that Shady Hill uses in Kindergarten and first grade) and program them to draw pictures. Barbara loved the idea and immediately shared it with lower-school science teacher Tracy Polte. They are planning to do the activity with the lower schoolers this year. Barbara also gets to visit schools and talk with teachers around the world, giving her a fresh perspective on education in the US and a greater understanding of education around the world.