Staff Work Day
The high school students were given the day off today so their teachers could work on some important projects together. This was not a regularly scheduled staff work day, but one that the staff decided it desperately needed. The school simply sent letters home saying that, although grades Pre-K to 6th would meet as usual, all high school students would have the day off.

The projects we worked on today came out of what the high school teachers considered the most pressing challenges facing their work and students. We divided into three groups. One tackled the job of designing a new schedule of classes to replace the problematic schedule currently in place. (See the first picture). A second group wrote policies the school sorely needed and brainstormed a list of basic policies that still need to be written. My group worked on developing an Environmental Science curriculum that will be integrated with the existing Science and Geography classes. (See second picture)
Dolly and I were very pleased with the work of our group. We were able to ascertain what the Science and Civics classes were teaching at every grade level. Then, unexpectedly, we helped the Science teacher to re-design the Science curriculum to be more up-to-date based on research and best practices, better scaffolded and coherent, and more in parallel with the themes taught in Civics.
Finally, we aligned the Environmental Science objectives with the rest, and came away with a preliminary framework for a curriculum that really makes sense for grades 7-11. We have a lot more work to do to integrate what is taught in the Land Stewardship classes and to polish up the curriculum, but we were very pleased with our progress.
It struck me that, before today, the Science and Civics teachers had never talked about what they were teaching, and didn’t even seem to know each other very well. Since the entire high school faculty consists of six teachers, this really surprised me. By the end of the four-hour meeting, they were teasing each other and putting their arms around each other like they had been friends forever.
As an example of the alignment we were able to accomplish, we agreed to teach different aspects of hunger during a particular quarter in 8th grade. The Civics teacher will introduce the concept of hunger, its definition, its causes, its distribution in Costa Rica, and some of the problems hunger causes society. The Science teacher will teach nutrition and show students how hunger manifests itself in the human body, and the Environmental Science teacher will cover potential solutions to the problem of hunger, from agricultural and other perspectives.
We convened with the other two groups halfway through the morning to report on our progress and inform each other’s work. At noon, we were supposed to finish and share a potluck lunch, but one group kept on working and I was I was the only one who had brought a dish to share, so Dolly and I moved on to a meeting we had scheduled with the Head of the School and the Director of Land Stewardship (Milton) and we shared my salad with them.
After that, we had another meeting with Milton and the first grade teacher (Jean) about how to prepare ourselves to incubate and raise chicks. Milton is building a chicken coop for them, Jean advised the process and offered to supply fertilized eggs from her own farm, and Dolly was charged with finding funding to support the project.
I was pleased with the work we did today and with my contribution to it. It felt good.