Head of School's Message: Sept. 29
The concrete arrived last week. Two thousand two hundred cubic yards weighing 4.6 million pounds will be poured before the Chandler Tower Project is completed. That’s more than 10,000 pounds of concrete for each Chandler student. Chandler School is built to last.
On Friday, Chandler’s 64th birthday, we celebrated Founder's Day. For that morning’s assembly, Director of Communications Martin Voss assembled a series of slides documenting Chandler’s history which he narrated. Peter Gabriel’s "Sledgehammer" played quietly in the background. The volume increased to accompany slides of the demolitions of the old Lower School buildings in 1999 and the old Middle School buildings in 2009. A series of time-lapse photos documented the progress of the Tower project.
An article in the latest issue of Education Week by Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, and MIT’s Peter Senge, the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, addressed the understanding that schools should not only produce graduates proficient in an agreed upon set of thinking and learning skills, but also students who work well together and are self-motivating, responsible learners with the ability to contribute to healthy enterprises, families and communities. The pedagogic application of these life skills goes by the name social and emotional learning.
The authors identified systems thinking as a trend in schools to deepen academic as well as social emotional learning. When students are engaged in issues of genuine concern to them, they are ‘ ystems thinkers’. Systems thinkers seek to understand the big picture and observe how elements within a system change over time. They know how to change perspective to increase understanding. The key is for teachers to ask the right questions and offer the right prompts so that students can make connections. Project based learning units provide the context for students to develop these skills.
In last Wednesday’s school group activity, students gathered in their multi-age groupings and watched a short video on making the world better. Working together, they wrote suggestions that included the following from our younger students: “Take shorter showers, recycle and ride a bike.” “Go to the humane society and read to the animals.” “Teach people to dance.” Faculty will be using some of the suggestions from students as a basis for future school group activities.
Those ideas from the members of the Class of 2023 could well have come from the Chandler class of 1953. When they established Chandler, it’s doubtful if Tom and Katie Chandler were thinking about social and emotional learning, systems thinking or 4.6 million pounds of concrete being used to build a new parking lot. They established a school built to last with small classes and strong teachers that develop a child’s intellect and character. Sixty-four years later, we’re still growing from their legacy.
Most sincerely,
John Finch
Head of School
