From Summer Planning to Classroom Practice: Friends Faculty Shape the Year Ahead

Friends Seminary’s first Anchor Grant & Lighthouse Award gallery walk on Monday, September 29, 2025, showcased a culture of open sharing and sustained innovation across the curriculum. Conceived and launched by K-12 Dean of Studies Hassan Wilson, the initiative will continue annually, creating a dependable rhythm for faculty to bring summer work into public view and into conversation with colleagues. Over the summer, talented educators researched, designed, and prototyped new approaches—then brought that work into the open. The room functioned like a working library: clear goals, practical tools, and candid dialogue about what moves learning forward, with teachers comparing notes, adapting one another’s ideas, and refining plans so students feel the impact this year.

At the heart of the program are two complementary grants. The Anchor Grant advances curriculum aligned with divisional and K–12 priorities by addressing essential curricular needs, developing shared resources, and strengthening coherence across courses and grade levels. The Lighthouse Award recognizes projects that meet a genuine need while introducing innovative, transformative approaches to pedagogy—pilots that test what is next and illuminate paths others can follow. Together, they create time for deep work and spaces where educators learn from one another—openly, generously, and often.

Along the room’s perimeter, posters, prototypes, and annotated unit maps traced a summer’s worth of reading, drafting, and testing. What follows is a snapshot of the remarkable, teacher-designed work on view during the gallery walk—examples from across divisions that show how these grants turn summer ideas into everyday classroom moves.

A dedicated Lighthouse Award spotlight leaned into AI as both subject and tool. For example, Victoria Ford explored how AI can inform the teaching of Grade 6 science—but after testing, she determined that direct AI feedback wasn’t yet reliable for middle schoolers. Instead, she now uses AI behind the scenes to prototype prompts, sample hypotheses, and planning materials; students then analyze those teacher-generated examples, test claims against evidence, and capture decisions in lab notebooks—treating AI as an object of inquiry rather than a classroom assistant.

In Grade 5 science, Elizabeth Lipshutz similarly employs AI on the teacher side to generate planning prompts and differentiated materials—scaffolded lessons, tiered assessments, and multimodal activities—keeping direct student use developmentally aligned. The opening unit, Skills of a Scientist, now serves as the model for the series.

By contrast, two Upper School projects invite students to engage directly with AI. In World History II, Peter Kalajian built a daily current-events rotation in which students bring three stories—local, national, and international—author a moral or philosophical question for each, and then pose those questions to AI to surface additional context and perspectives. Students compare AI outputs with sourced reporting, interrogate bias and omissions using the N.A.C.H.O.S. lens (Newsworthy, Approachable, Connections, Helpful, Ongoing, Sourced), and document how their understanding shifts.

In Upper School Visual Arts, Jesse Pasca created a standalone "Socratic AI" app that his Art History classes are currently using. The class is wrestling with this new technology within a framework posited by Martin Heidegger—a distinction between poiesis and enframing. Rather than using generative AI for quick answers or as a storehouse of data and information, students engage with it to uncover their thinking and deepen their claims. Pasca's touchstone is the windmill: enframing sees it only as a machine producing kilowatts; poiesis sees the windmill as revealing the power of the wind itself. In that spirit, students prompt the model as a probing interlocutor—engaging in demanding intellectual labor that leads to authentic understanding. Each student self-selects an investigative arc along one of ten interdisciplinary "Ribs" (e.g., Political & Social Structures, Race, Colonialism & Diaspora), connecting analysis to personal interests and current issues. The exported AI dialogue becomes part of the scholarly record: a visible trail of the student's claims, evidence, and revisions that makes learning visible for students and the teacher alike, highlights unsupported assertions or gaps in reasoning, and marks moments when an idea crystallizes. This app also has the added benefit of offering the students autonomy through a 24/7, non-judgmental thought partner and of helping to cultivate curiosity by centering inquiry on student choice. The culminating product will be forward-facing: public video-podcast episodes in Adobe Express that present a well-argued position on a myriad of artworks and link to both meaningful historical and contemporary issues.

Several talented faculty members received Anchor Grants to advance this work across disciplines. The following is just a snapshot of what was presented during the Gallery Walk: In mathematics, Melanie Smith detailed her Algebra 1 “Flag Time” project—a library of targeted resources for every unit paired with a new reflection-and-conferencing cycle that builds a yearlong Reflection Portfolio, turning test corrections into genuine analysis of errors and next steps. In Grade 3, Steven Fong and Judith Seidel showcased a STEM collaboration that turns curiosity into engineering habits through open-ended design challenges, peer-feedback protocols, and careful documentation of iteration.

In the humanities, History Department Chair Stefan Stawnychy mapped a unit that pairs comics and graphic nonfiction with primary sources and formal argument, using the visual language of panels and gutters to reframe how students encounter and interpret American history. Elizabeth Grossi shared a refreshed Ancient India sequence that centers inquiry and source work; her materials outline throughlines (geography, belief, governance, daily life), comparative checkpoints, and close-reading routines that help sixth graders build claims with evidence.

Middle School colleagues Amy Smith and Sue Beyersdorf presented practical systems—checklists, annotation scaffolds, and reflection prompts—that help students manage complex tasks and make their thinking visible across disciplines. In Upper School science, Alex Lavy and Eli Sidman unveiled a flipped model for Chemistry 1A: concise video mini-lessons shift direct instruction out of class so students can work problems with teacher coaching; quick mastery checks, error analysis, and short conferences make feedback timely and targeted. And in English, Yuxi Lin and Leana Phipps previewed a Grade 6 short-story arc that blends mentor texts and focused “micro-moves” (dialogue, pacing, imagery) with single-point rubrics and brief author’s notes—structures that make revision intentional and visible.

What emerged was less a showcase than a working library: sturdy materials ready to use, ideas easy to remix, and conversations that moved quickly from curiosity to adoption. It offered a clear picture of a faculty that reads closely, designs carefully, and shares generously—innovators anchored in mission and unafraid to explore what’s next. The room offered a rare pairing: breadth that surprised, depth that persuaded, and faculty ready to put both to work this year.

Congratulations to all who shared work at the gallery walk and inspired colleagues across the School. This collective expertise—and the willingness to make practice public—continues to strengthen the program and the community.