Community Update for 6/1/20
Dear Stone Students and Families,
I’ve long been a fan of Guy Raz’s excellent “How I Built This” podcast; I’ve been listening particularly closely to the most recent HIBT episodes in which Raz interviews entrepreneurs and founders trying to navigate the global health crisis. On one such episode, writer Simon Sinek describes the need for successful organizations to design for long-term success -- that successful organizations need to design for “existential flexibility”, that evidence of existential flexibility is found in any organization’s capacity to, “make a 180 degree turn, to deal with a completely changed environment.”
A completely changed environment indeed.
It was only 14 weeks ago that Abby and I were at the Mastery Transcript Consoritum meet-up in Philadelphia, listening to influential independent schools talk about a distant future in which schools might have to re-think assessment; only 13 weeks ago we were all packed into the theatre for our first ever Entrepreneurship Fair; only 12 weeks ago that we announced Stone would “pivot” to online for a few weeks and we’d reassess from there.
What a twelve weeks it has been for the education industry.
Over the last twelve weeks, many of the supposed “benchmarks” of what school “is” have changed or vanished -- from the idea that school is purely a “bricks and mortar” endeavor; to our reliance on the SAT, ACT, and AP tests; to the idea that “seat time” and “GPA” are the only ways to measure “learning”. In a very real way, these past twelve weeks have provided a kind of existential crisis for schools across the country.
And, yet, for twelve weeks our dynamic community has shown its capacity to be nimble, to practice empathy and gratitude, to caretake, to “deal with a completely changed environment”. In fact, what we’ve learned over these past twelve weeks is that remaining steadfast in our values -- we value deep learning, curiosity, high level collaboration, vulnerability, feedback, and culture building -- has allowed us space to be flexible and dynamic with our model. For twelve weeks, our students and our student leadership teams have built and rebuilt meaningful social experiences for each other; our House leaders and Prefects have honored their House members and written letters to each other (#LevengoodForever) and yard-signed each other; our faculty have designed and redesigned Learning-From-Home from the ground-up; our parents have attended dozens of meetings and coordinated enormous experiences for our faculty and our seniors and supported each other and supported us when we really, really needed it.
From the first day of LFH to the Stone Cold Convoy to the PPE Project to Teacher Appreciation Week to the many game nights to the Monaghan Ring Ceremony -- we have again and again proved that though we are indeed far apart, we are still very much Stone.
This morning, at 8:30am, we began the culminating experience of our students’ academic year: Exhibition Week. The first two presentations began at 8;30; by 9:00am our School was awash in public exhibitions of learning designed to measure synthesis, research, critical thinking, complexity of thought, and human-centered design. Over five powerful hours today I sat through eight Junior Workshop presentations; over the next four days Stone will host another 17 Junior Workshops, another 36 BCQ responses, five Senior Defenses, and three 90 minute Exhibitions of Learning in the Middle School. Over these five days all of our extraordinary students will show us evidence -- with increasing and developmentally appropriate complexity and richness -- that they have acquired new skills in formal academic writing or in applied mathematics or in economic thought; that they can use collaboration tools and 3D design tools and digital recording tools and presentation technologies; that they can formulate an answer to an abstract question with specific evidence and convince an audience that their answer “works” as a system of thought.
This is what “finals weeks” should be. And in all honesty, I get chills just thinking about it. About the work our students will exhibit this week, about the journey they have each undertaken, about the vast expanse of learning they will share with their teachers this week.
About their capacity to navigate and find success in “a completely changed environment”.
This past weekend, a Stone parent sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal (Will The Pandemic Revolutionize College Admissions?) which featured this remarkable pull quote: “Too often schools have measured what’s easily measurable and not what’s meaningful.”
Here’s to four more days of meaningful work,
Mike Simpson, Head of School