Approaching School Days as Architecture: An Idea Revisited

[vimeo 74943290 w=500 h=281]<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/74943290″>Asheville School Project Connect Ross Peters 2013</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/sobriquetstudio”>Sobriquet Studio</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

In 2013 I had the privilege of speaking at Asheville School’s Project Connect.  For me, returning to this remarkable small boarding school was a homecoming as I taught at Asheville School for ten years and was the founding Chair of its integrated, interdisciplinary Humanities Department.

There are some great folks on the faculty there helping to lead the way in discussions about how to think about interdisciplinary work.  In 2011, Asheville School launched “Project Connect”, a biannual summer institute for interdisciplinary studies. The Asheville School webpage identifies it this way: “Through a partnership with the E.E. Ford Foundation, Project Connect seeks to help teachers and schools start, sustain, and strengthen interdisciplinary initiatives in order to equip students with the higher order skills (critical thinking, problem solving, analytical reasoning, and written communication) they will need to succeed in college and in life.” The next Project Connect will occur this June. I look forward to returning.

I didn’t realize it (or perhaps remember it) until this morning, but my comments were filmed and subsequently posted on Vimeo. My topic was “Approaching School Days as Architecture: Building Academic Schedules to Unlock Interdisciplinary Potential,” and it has some relevance to the work underway at my current school where I inherited a conversation about the academic daily schedule, which had been put on hold last Winter. The faculty committee studying our use of time and leading the way forward for St. George’s has deftly moved us to a place where we are likely to be ready to move forward with a new daily schedule for the Fall of 2016.

While some of what I shared in 2013 lacks relevance to St. George’s, much of it is clearly pertinent. One thing I continue to believe is that simple tweaking of a schedule does not produce results worthy of the effort necessary to make the change. At Hawken School and at The Westminster Schools where we thoroughly reinvented our use of time, we were able to take steps that have significantly and positively transformed the learning environment of each school. I want nothing less for St. George’s.

Much water has gone under the bridge since 2013 when I spoke at Project Connect. One fascinating experience was being invited to consult with North Shore Country Day School as they thoughtfully engaged a process to reimagine their academic daily schedule. To be able to step outside of my particular school and see another group face the complex calculus of school change was a gift. As I understand it NSCDS has moved into a new schedule for the 2015-2016 school year.

Virtually everything that has happened over the last two and half years reinforces my belief that we can create smarter, more balanced, and more strategic academic daily schedules in our schools. To get there, however, we a need a smart, balanced, and strategic process to create the right individual answer for any school.I have written more about academic schedules: Revisiting a Guiding Idea: Creating a Progress Culture in a School and School Transformation: Becoming a Progress Culture