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Education as a Journey Inward and Outward

The three presentations that composed this year’s sixth annual Art of Teaching Lecture on April 20 varied in content, but at their center, each focused on an important lesson for student achievement: Clarity of mind is crucial for academic success.
The three presentations that composed this year’s sixth annual Art of Teaching Lecture on April 20 varied in content, but at their center, each focused on an important lesson for student achievement: Clarity of mind is crucial for academic success.  
 
This year, for the first time, the Art of Teaching Lecture—titled “Education as a Journey Inward and Outward”—featured presentations by three different teachers. Lauren Cohen, who teaches fourth grade, kicked off the lecure in the Library with her talk on the importance of mindfulness in the classroom.
 
“About 15 years ago I was introduced to the mindfulness practice,” she said, “and I was taught to think of it as a bird with two wings: There’s the wing of wisdom, and there’s the wing of compassion. And what they translate to is, what am I feeling, and how can I respond to that without judgment, without clamping down on myself?”
 
Cohen stressed that educators need to teach their students to enjoy the process of learning and discovery. “Confidence is not something you can bestow on a child,” she said. She urged teachers to move away from encouraging a “fixed mindset”—in which a child’s self-esteem is based largely on praise and results—and instead foster in their students a “growth mindset,” which stresses the rewards of a good effort, rather than simply a good test score.
 
Seventh grade history teacher Elizabeth Grossi spoke about helping her students think like historians. Her talk, titled “Teaching Middle School History: Declaring Independence,” emphasized ways in which teachers can use technology to reduce their students’ “cognitive load”—in other words, the amount of mental energy a student is asked to use. Grossi found that the digital learning platform Haiku helped students focus less on the organizational challenges of seventh grade and instead devote their mental energy toward reading, writing, and analysis.
 
On Haiku, Grossi’s students can see upcoming assignments, view sample essays, and write with Google Docs, so that they can ask questions and receive responses right on the page as they draft an assignment. Grossi gave her students an anonymous survey and found that they responded positively to Haiku. (She added, “Seventh graders are brutally honest. They will tell you what they think; you don’t need an anonymous survey.”)
 
Finally, Science Department Chair Hassan Wilson stepped up to the podium—and promptly ignored it, walking up and down the aisle as he spoke about creating YouTube videos to explain scientific concepts as a way of offloading direct instruction in the classroom. “Students were getting content on demand,” he said of his eighth-graders.
 
The initiative “opened up new opportunities for the class,” Wilson said, because he spent less time talking at the students and more time working with them one-on-one, or in smaller groups. And the students spent more time talking to each other about what they learned in the videos. When the students watched the videos ahead of time, as part of their homework, they came to class more prepared.
 
The evening ended, appropriately enough, with a short “reflective activity” that Cohen often does with her students. She asked the audience to imagine their mind as a jar full of colorful gumballs, each one representing a piece of information that they learned during the lecture. “In a moment,” Cohen said, “you’re going to turn the dial, and a gumball is going to come out”—a word or phrase that encapsulates the lecture. 
 
“What color is your gumball?” one woman asked the person sitting next to her. “Mine is blue.”

View photos from the event here.
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Friends Seminary — the oldest continuously operated, coeducational school in NYC — serves college-bound day students in Kindergarten-Grade 12.