/ on campus /
Posted @ NMH Classes began Tuesday, Sept. 4. What advice would you give to the class of 2016?
Mentoring New Teachers
To strengthen its intern program, NMH collaborates with UPenn.
facebook.com/NMHschool facebook.com/NMHArchives Lucy Polley Brinkley ’05: Cherish your time here. The four years really fly by!
Photo: Glenn Minshall
Megan Buchanan Cherry ’91: Open mind, open heart, tie your shoes and pull up your pants so you’re ready to move! Randi Rourke Barreiro ’95: Conduct yourself as if your grandparents lived on campus with you. Gail Myers Pare ’64: If you are homesick, hang on. It will go away, and being at NMH is worth it! David Sarpal ’90: Give every ounce of yourself to your work and to those around you. Martha Slater ’87: Speak up for what you believe in, and follow your curiosities even if they seem eccentric—NMH may be the most supportive community you ever encounter for building these skills. Joung Hwang ’93: Hackneyed, but still— carpe diem!
@NMHschool @NMHHoggers @Arts_at_NMH @MichaelFosberg: Expand your scope; speak with a classmate you’ve never spoken to before. @JMixB: If you see something that looks like a cat on campus at night, it’s NOT a cat. It’s a skunk. Walk away slowly.
8 I NMH Magazine
University of Pennsylvania grad students and NMH faculty interns Hayley Very (left) and Iris Aliaj are inaugurating a new “residency master’s in teaching” program.
NMH, like many of its peer institutions, hires a handful of faculty interns every year to teach, coach, and advise students and learn the ropes of boarding-school professional life. This year, NMH is adding new structure to its intern program by collaborating with several peer schools and the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Penn has begun offering a degree called the Penn Residency Master’s in Teaching (PRMT), which combines two years of graduate school with a practicum in teaching, and that is where NMH and six other northeastern boarding schools come in. Collectively, the schools (Deerfield, Hotchkiss, Milton, Miss Porter’s, St. Paul’s, and Lawrenceville) have hired 24 “teaching fellows” to inaugurate Penn’s program. These new teachers will balance fulltime responsibilities at their boarding schools with course work for Penn; they also will attend several short-term teaching
sessions each year at Penn and the participating schools, and meet weekly with a mentor. “At NMH, we’ve had a lot of success in bringing young teachers in, coaching them up, and having them do a great job,” says Dean of Faculty Hugh Silbaugh. “But among this group of independent schools, we’ve discussed at length the challenges of mentoring new teachers and the desire to do a more consistent, more thorough job of induction.” For the next two years, NMH will work with a pair of PRMT fellows in the science and math departments, respectively: Hayley Very, a 2010 University of New Hampshire graduate who spent last year as a science teaching fellow at Andover; and Iris Aliaj, who grew up in Albania before graduating from Amherst last May with a degree in math and psychology. “The unique part of the Penn program is that we’ll be completely