Calling Upon Our Roots as Educational Innovators

By Ralph L. Wales

As I make my way home each evening—a journey down a path to the residence for the Head of School—a warm sign glows in the middle of our campus. It adorns the entryway to an emerging center of our school’s work and reads: Benchmark School Innovation Lab.

We are still learning our way into the opportunity aff orded by this unique space that emerged at the start of school a little over a year ago. As is the case with any change, it is a step-wise process when new architecture attaches to wellestablished, successful patterns of teaching practice.

This fall we have reveled in the ways in which a new space triggers a pioneer’s spirit. We have plunged into that mix. Our youngest have spilled out Legos on the lab’s spacious tables and imagined, planned, and built inventive homes and our middle schoolers have turned social studies class into team-building exercises in creating visual representations of historical events.

It’s been a joy and inspiration for me to witness our faculty create opportunities for our children’s minds, hands, and hearts to be simultaneously engaged. A new space is nurturing a new and relevant pedagogy.

The truth is that in most cases our country’s educational practices continue to rest on the foundation of an industrial

society—an outdated stimulus for a school’s purpose. Once, the capacity to educate young people to eff ectively replicate the patterns of success defi ned educational excellence. Now we live in a world where quite the opposite is true.

It’s process, not product, that matters now. Even more so, it’s the capacity to think on your feet, to see today’s failure as an exciting discovery and not a cause for despair, that now are the sought-after skills and natures that are required.

Benchmark has always worked to erode the misguided perception that we are here to remediate a child’s ways of learning. Our message has been and still is that we are here to advance a child’s unique ways of thinking, combining their innate talents with the lessons that develop the courage and determination to experiment with confi dence and joy.

We have always honored the power of our children’s imaginations. We take pride in our readiness as educators to be innovators rather than preservers of patterned pedagogy. We step boldly now into the truth that educational excellence is not found in learning a set of siloed subjects. Rather, it is an integrated experience where math meets literature in the library and science is as easily found in the art studio as it is applied in a science lab.

This is the recipe for the times we live in.

As we step into the second half of our school’s fi rst century, we once again call on our capacity to lead the way. It is the moment that we have been waiting for: the time when Benchmark’s commitment to children with learning diff erences comes into contact with the world’s demand that education prepares children to learn diff erently.

That glow of the sign in our backyard is our 21st century version of Benchmark’s long-held purpose and mission.