Professional Development & Summer Reading to Enhance Learning/Teaching

Our faculty enjoyed exploring the 2018-2019 School-year theme “Empathy and Ethical Thinking.” It guided our programming, curriculum, and conversations throughout the year and helped us focus on our mission and community values. It elevated the way we interact with others, and it inspired us when our students responded to the importance of this quality in life. Of course, this work is never done, and we will continue to reflect on this important subject in the future.

Over the summer our faculty and administrators are attending workshops, taking courses, designing curriculum, exploring the content they teach, and learning about new pedagogical approaches for improved outcomes in learning and teaching.

In addition, our faculty selected between two professional reading choices. The books represent the ways in which people create stories, participate in and explore interests, and reflect their place in a culture — one through the use of the narrative and the other through ideation and making. This year we have chosen Every Tool is a Hammer: Life is What You Make It and Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce and Politics.

In the book Every Tool is a Hammer: Life is What You Make It, author Adam Savage and star of the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters hopes “to inspire you to build, make, invent, explore, and—most of all—enjoy the thrills of being a creator.” Savage captures the importance of empowering people to use their creativity as they search for their place in the world and the contributions they can make to it.

Participatory Culture in a Networked Area focuses on youth and technology. Written as a dialogue between three academics, it takes a philosophical approach about ways that technology can influence young people. The research for this book was funded by the MacAuthur Foundation and is the basis for current thought leadership as it applies to the digital world we are all navigating.

We are excited to delve into these two books and see where they take us.