Ridge Report for March 2013

Report

The Ridge

March 2013

Your Role in ‘Project Parent’ I just returned from the annual meeting of the

level of supervision. If you are driving with your

National Association of Independent Schools,

8-year-old when she sees a friend, she might say,

which each year gathers together some of the best

“Dad, there’s Hanna. Honk the horn so she sees

thinkers and doers in education today. Leaving the

us!” Five years later, that exact scenario plays out

conference without at least 10 good ideas means

in a completely different way. If a dad is driving

you really weren’t paying attention. As with many

with his daughter, and she spots Hanna, before he

gatherings of educators, there is a lot of talking. I

can think of hitting the horn, his now 13-year-old

always enjoy the opportunity this time allows for

shouts, “DAAAAAAD ... Please don’t honk!” as

colleagues, some of whom may have worked

she throws herself under the dashboard.

alongside each other in the past, to connect. Many of them always seem to have a nugget of wisdom

The developmental challenge for the middle

they will casually pass along.

school and high school parent is complicated.

Your daughter has to “fire” you for her own good,

A friend of mine shared this story with me,

as a necessary first step towards independence.

something he heard a psychologist recently offer

Once this happens, there are just two things you

as advice for parents: Parents go through stages of

need to do: First, you have to grieve, because a

development, just like their kids do; and school

wonderful stage of life is now over. Second, like

administrators have to understand where parents

any project manager, once you’ve been fired, you

are in their own development, because this often

have to figure out a way to get rehired as a

affects their students in important ways.

consultant.

In the early years, parents are project managers;

My best to you and your family as we begin our

they organize their kids, check their backpacks

remaining months together this academic year.

and planners and make sure they take their lunches with them to school. Primary school students are almost always comfortable with this

Cheers!

Mark Pierotti Head of School

International and Residential Life:

We’ve Come A Long Way

By Rosanne Tomich International and Residential Admissions Coordinator

It was one year ago, March 2012, that Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart finally obtained the Bellevue city permit to renovate the convent. The renovation was designed to transform the convent into a dormitory, now known as the Residential Life Building. As many of you know, our new Residential Life Program started this fall. So much has happened in the course of a year!

Typically, by March admission offices are finalizing reenrollments and welcoming newly admitted families. Having only just received the permitting go-ahead at that late date (in the admission world) we needed to use our time and effort at maximum efficiency.

Consequently, I traveled to China with Jasmine Reyes to recruit and interview students, visiting Beijing, Shanghai, Ningbo and Hangzhou over the course of 12 days. The journey was long and exhausting; however, the outcome of the trip was a full dormitory.

Forest Ridge has a total of 32 international students in the school, 27 of whom live in the Residential Life Building. Currently the house has 24 Chinese girls and 3 Korean girls. The remainder of the international students, mostly from China and Korea, live off-campus with a parent or relative. We have an eighth-grader who holds a Romanian passport yet lived in Germany prior to moving to Seattle in November.

The transition to Forest Ridge and the United States was huge for the Residential Life girls — yet unique to each student. From the school schedule to the dorm rules, from the weather to uniforms, from project-based learning to class participation, from American food to mandatory study hall hours … life was definitely different for the girls.

Many of the students were not used to making their own choices in their home countries. Consequently only two girls participated in fall sports; however, six have participated in ski /snowboard bus, and 24 are participating in spring sports!

Members of the Residential staff are available to assist the girls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — with everything from trips to the doctor and dentist to help with homework and cooking. They’re also available just to chat about life. Director of Residential Life Sue Winsnes and her staff work hard to facilitate students’ participation in weekend activities, including exploring Seattle and the surrounding area. The girls love taking trips to Factoria Mall and Bellevue Square.

They have had pizza parties and movie nights, an excursion to the pumpkin patch in October, sushi-making demonstrations, a road trip to Portland, volunteer experiences at St. Martin de Porres on Sunday nights, Thanksgiving dinner with FR families, community service on Saturday mornings, swimming at a local pool, bowling, food tours, museums, and on and on. We are planning several college tours during Spring Break.

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Life is exciting, and something is always happening at the house.

We would love for you or your daughter or both of you to visit the Residential Life Building and spend time with the girls. They need to practice English, and many of them would love to have a conversation buddy. You can talk or read together or play cards or board games.

If you’re so inclined, you can help tutor the international students.

Perhaps you’d like to include one or two of the girls on your family’s weekend getaway or provide a meal, coffee or bubble tea. The girls always welcome new off-campus experiences.

This year, two of the Residential Life students will graduate. We are excited to report that a student from Thailand and another from Jakarta, Indonesia, will join us next year. As we move forward with our international and domestic recruitment, we hope many other countries will be represented on campus and in the Residential Life Program.

If you have connections in other countries — such as work colleagues, family members or friends who teach or work at a school or have children who attend schools abroad, I would appreciate your help establishing contacts at those schools. Recruitment is all about relationships, and our existing relationships and yours can help Forest Ridge extend our reach. Please email me (rosanneto@forestridge.org ), and I will contact your family or friend to pursue recruitment opportunities. Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Meet Our 2013–2014 Sacred Heart Scholar The newest Sacred Heart scholar at Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart is a young woman who plays the recorder, loves Dr. Who and might just “save the world,” according to one of her teachers.

for her “brilliant mind” and her “honesty and gentleness,” as well as her “wonderful sense of humor” and “can-do” attitude. Eighth-grade faculty member David Fierce called Izzy “a friend to all in the community.”

Isabella “Izzy” Tavarez-Brown has been selected to receive the Sacred Heart Scholarship for 2013–2014.

In her scholarship application essay, Izzy described a recent leadership experience she had at a diversity conference held at The Northwest School. She worked with a group of middle and high school boys and girls to create a video on the topic Nobody’s perfect and that’s why everyone is. The topic, conceived by Izzy, the group’s leader, was meant to “bring to light why everyone should celebrate themselves for how unique and different they are from everyone else,” Izzy explains.

The Sacred Heart Scholarship is a merit-based scholarship awarded annually to an incoming ninth-grade student. It is a great honor to be named a Sacred Heart scholar — she is considered a leader in her class. Each Sacred Heart Scholarship is renewed annually if the recipient fulfills the duties of the Sacred Heart scholar, acts as a positive role model for the student body and maintains good academic standing. Each scholar is evaluated annually at reenrollment time to assess her standing for the following school year.

Izzy, the daughter of High School faculty member Dr. Maritza Tavarez-Brown and James Brown, will be a freshman in the high school at Forest Ridge this fall.

“Izzy is exactly what we want a Sacred Heart scholar to be: confident and academically curious, a young woman who lives the Goals every day,” says Director of High School Admission Shana Abner. “She embodies the Sacred Heart spirit at Forest Ridge.”

All of Izzy’s teachers agree that she is a natural choice to be a Sacred Heart scholar. Their recommendations praise Izzy

Leadership opportunity stands out in Izzy’s mind as something that’s special about Forest Ridge. It also exemplifies what is special about Isabella Tavarez-Brown.

“I was given an opportunity to instruct other kids and even other teachers,” she says. “I felt like the others didn’t understand my passion for the subject of diversity and that it was my job to educate them if they didn’t decide to learn for themselves,” Izzy adds.

Izzy hopes to become a scientist one day and looks forward to learning about chemistry in high school. She is also interested in participating in the Sacred Heart Network Exchange program. “It’s a great opportunity to make new friends,” she says.

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Creative Problem Solving begins

Dr. Carola D. Wittmann Director of the High School

In its February 2013 issue, Educational Leadership focuses on creativity in teaching and learning. It is common knowledge that creative problem solving has become a much sought-after skill, equally espoused by educational entities, business leaders, government agencies and the media. However, when it comes to either assessing creativity or, especially at the classroom level, encouraging it, actually making it happen, educators and students alike can encounter vague standards or expectations. Because creativity is so often associated with outside-the-box thinking or the conception of original ideas, students whose approach to an assignment is task-appropriate may not be perceived as being creative. This issue of Educational Leadership is helpful in demystifying creativity while acknowledging that at its most profound level, the creative process begins with noticing.

While reading that particular article, I was struck by the return of the familiar under a different name. In my head I could hear my own parents reminding me to slow down, or check my work, look for the connections. Noticing encompasses all of these behaviors, along with others.

It includes creative visualization and exploration, strategies we frequently discuss with our students, sometimes as part of direct instruction in the class-room, sometimes as part of a homework lab with Ms. McLaughlin. I also hear it during Common Work Period, when a faithful group of students gathers almost daily at the corner table outside my office; they demonstrate understanding and synthesis through curiosity and creativity.

Most recently I observed students noticing in a math class and a chemistry class. In both cases, students took time to peruse the equations and formulas. In small groups they

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with Noticing began sharing with one another exactly what they were noticing, explaining how strategies could be combined to arrive at solutions (creativity) and questioning how to reliably test a hypothesis (curiosity).

The concept of noticing, however, also applies to teachers.

And just like their students, educators often lack the space and time to engage in that process. Planning a conceptual lesson that integrates higher levels of understanding, application, synthesis and evaluation takes time and collaboration.

During our most recent in-service day, in February, we worked on the concept of backward design. At its framework, backward design asks that we begin a process with the end in mind, articulating clearly what we want students to know and be able to explain long term. Units begin with the overarching essential question, open-ended, frequently drawing on ethics or philosophical roots. The essential question challenges students to notice, to be comfortable with not knowing all the answers, to realize that there may be no specific answer. It challenges the teacher, who might have to let go of some favorite classroom activities for the sake of making space for conceptual teaching to take place. At the same time, instruction takes into account data and research, reflecting teaching as both an art and a science.

At Forest Ridge High School, the noticing classroom encourages students and teachers to “revise and rehearse” and to “view error as opportunity,” reflecting real world achievement (Educational Leadership, February 2013).

It’s an excellent start!

There’s No “Sigh”

in Science!

By Sara Konek and Christine Witcher Middle School Faculty

“But you are the teacher; you’re supposed to know everything!”

It’s not uncommon for a student to respond with shock when a teacher admits not having an answer to all her questions. They see us as gatekeepers of a trove of knowledge that, in time, they too will possess. What we aim to teach them is that being a scientist isn’t about the answers; it’s about learning to ask the right questions.

We love it when our students realize that teachers don’t have all the answers, and actually even the experts don’t have all the answers.

There are still mysteries to be solved, discoveries to be made and solutions to be invented.

We also love it when our students say, “Wait, I just heard about that on the news this morning!” or “We were just talking about that in social studies class yesterday.” Connections between science and real life don’t have to be manufactured. They leap out! Science is relevant to our students’ real lives because science is all about exploring the world around us and trying to understand how it works.

Learning to experiment with what you know, to ask questions and to look for evidence to support ideas works for everything from math class to meteor strikes. The Scientific Method, a formal structure for inquiry, guides a scientist through a process of careful questioning, creation of hypotheses, systematic evidence collection and analysis and revision of hypotheses. This process provides a universally accepted format for research in a science laboratory, but we also see it creep into the daily lives of our students as they navigate friendships, write short stories, analyze their own learning and participate in drama and athletics.

“This is fun! Can we do this again?” Sometimes students are surprised that they enjoy science class, but we aren’t surprised at all. Exploring science should be exciting! And it should be something that’s done through hands-on activities, not just through memorization or reading a book. A surprising result in a lab or a failed rocket launch demands that students question their assumptions, return to their starting point and formulate and test a new hypothesis. In the science classroom, experiential learning promotes real comprehension of an idea in a fraction of the time it might take to fully understand an idea presented in text.

Science class offers students more than just an understanding of cells, weather, asteroids or chemistry.

Your daughter’s science class gives her an opportunity to explore the awe of our world. She is invited to zoom in and think big as she takes a different look at life’s mysteries and conundrums. Ideally, she will come to see her place in that world and how she might use skills of questioning, solving, seeking and creating, combined with her individual passions, to engage with the world. Her science experience will help her grow as an innovative and globally minded leader who believes problems have solutions and who understands that her actions and choices have impact beyond herself.

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Thinking big

in a hope-filled way Regina Mooney, Ph.D. Director of Institutional Advancement

As spring begins to emerge and we welcome the increasing daylight hours, I remind myself to at least look at the flowers, even if I can’t take the time to smell them. Activities around campus are coming at us — fast and furious — right now as we debrief from the 2013 Peace and Reconciliation trip and Forest Ridge’s first TEDx event and make final preparations for the Auction and the HS musical. Soon we will begin to think about 8th-Grade Promotion, Ring Ceremony and Graduation.

But first, it is important to stop, breathe and think about all the people who are making these wonderful things happen. I want to take a moment to recognize some goals we have reached together. Actually I shouldn’t say “we,” since I wasn’t here when you, the Forest Ridge community, met the challenges of the “Open Your Heart” campaign in 2010. At the end of this calendar year all pledge payments, will have been accounted for.

Even though it’s some months away, I think it is important to slow down for a minute and remember with gratitude what it took to make it happen.

students. Something besides a financial goal was met in the process. By taking on the challenge together the community of parents, alumnae, faculty, staff and friends who raised this money became more cohesive than ever.

With 1,143 donors making 1,689 contributions to the campaign, Forest Ridge achieved something in less than two years that it takes most comparable institutions five years to accomplish.

Donors, volunteers and staff made the vision of exponentially increasing scholarships a wish fulfilled. And a more favorable stock market has helped nearly double the scholarship endowment from where it stood in 2010; it now exceeds $18.5 million. A Forest Ridge education is more accessible to more

We don’t have all the answers yet to these new questions.

But we have hope grounded in the monumental success of the Open Your Heart campaign. To think big in a hope-filled way is the Forest Ridge way. So before we embark on a new vision for our future, it is imperative to revere what that future will be built on upon. And that is the foundation provided by a community joined together to make a pipe dream come true.

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By itself, meeting the goal of the Open Your Heart campaign was quite an accomplishment! An unintended and happy consequence of the campaign was that it positioned the School to think boldly and passionately about what more we can do to brighten the future for young women. True to form, faculty, administration and the Board are thinking creatively about making the School better. Some of our visioning is about finding solutions to vexing problems, such as how to mitigate the maintenance costs of aging Middle School buildings. Or, now that the International Baccalaureate Diploma is part of our program, how do we sustain it with continuous professional development for our faculty? As we embrace our global identity, how do we integrate it into each student’s experience?

Women as Global Leaders:

A cause for celebration This month, Women’s History Month, is cause for celebration at Forest Ridge, especially for Women as Global Leaders. The Peace and Reconciliation Program has completed its third year of engagement and travel, and together with the entire Forest Ridge community we presented our first TEDx event in celebration of International Women’s Day. This year’s Peace and Reconciliation experience was filled with new partnerships and opportunities Kisha Palmer Director, Women As Global Leaders

for growth and understanding. As in years past, we demonstrated to our in-country partners that we are not only consistent in our actions but respectful of a diversity of viewpoints. This year, we worked more closely with the Jewish and Arab Christian communities in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, respectively, and we are excited by the fruits of our consistent relationship building and stewardship.

While the rest of the international community learned of the Palestinian protests on behalf of hunger-striking political prisoners, the Forest Ridge team had a special opportunity. Our students were able to ask questions of and listen to perspectives from Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs around the value of security and the meaning of peace on both sides of the Separation Wall.

Our partnership with Atherton Sacred Heart Prep was truly took root during this year’s experience in Israel. Reid Particelli, Atherton’s service learning director, joined us to scope the viability of a future partnership between our two schools. He participated in all of our discussions and was inspired to share what he learned in Jerusalem with his own community. The student leaders of this year’s trip, Ellen Jacobus, Menbere Kebede and Nikki Lazarus, as well as Campus Minister Tanya Lange and I, will travel to Atherton to present what we learned and extend an invitation to the Atherton Board of Trustees and Senior Administration to join us in 2014. Whatever direction this new partnership takes, the possibilities are infinite, and the excitement is mutual.

Women as Global Leaders is also building momentum in this first year of our Resources and Sustainability Program. John Fenoli and Nui Nishida have done an incredible amount of work to create a curricular framework that supports student learning opportunities about the environment as well as the sociocultural complexities of life in Alaska for Native and non-Native people. We will journey to Alaska together as a class on June 13 and return on June 20 (just before the full-fledged mosquito season).

Innovate!, Forest Ridge’s inaugural TEDx event, held on campus March 8, was a huge success thanks to the efforts of our organizing team: Melissa Jones, Michael Smith, Brian Esguerra, Bryan Kendrick, Peggy O’Connor and student sound and light designers Fiona Rhodes and Nathalia Scrimshaw. I am also grateful for the vision and support of Leslie Decker, Mary Frances Feider and Pamela Rhodes, the FR parents who were instrumental in saying, “Yes, we absolutely CAN!”

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