It’s a type of question that arises at many independent schools: How might we mind the gap between who we are and who we aspire to be? Providence Day’s attempt to answer this broader question led to recognizing a tension between historically deployed pedagogies and the pedagogies students need now and in the future. Even before engaging with Magno’s team, Providence Day had begun to ask, “How might we institutionalize innovation?”
In response, Providence Day created The Center for the Art and Science of Teaching, Learning, and Entrepreneurship in 2015 in order to catalyze and sustain innovation. This “innovation engine” started as a five-member team: the director of digital integration and innovation, the design strategist, the community strategist, and two instructional support strategists. The educators in these roles bring skills and experiences from a variety of fields, including coaching, technology, improvisation, and design thinking. These team members collaborate in ever-changing permutations involving students, faculty, administrators, parents, and community partners.
In addition to the people, the center is a product of the same phases it now uses to drive institutional innovation: opportunity, solution, and impact. The center supports individuals and teams addressing adaptive challenges. The center develops and cultivates opportunity by listening to stories and pursuing the inspiration, wonder, and curiosity that emerge on campus daily. Inspired and challenged, the center empowers partners to develop solutions arising from wildly creative and radically collaborative problem-solving. Through ethnography and analysis, the center offers leadership and support when partners need to develop models for assessing the impact of those solutions.
The evolution of the sixth-grade assessment has been an illuminating example of the center’s process. Providence Day sixth-grade students now identify issues in their world and address them through a creative, collaborative problem-solving capstone assessment.
Magno’s team started conversations with the center about questions, challenges, and opportunities surrounding sixth-grade assessment. These conversations led to official consultations in which the center offered provocation and proposals for how to pursue solutions without providing them. Consultations then evolved into projects in which the center designed and facilitated experiences for faculty to explore possible assessments and receive the training needed to administer them. These possibilities have coalesced into an endeavor, guided by the center, that seeks to engage multiple divisions in evaluating assessment mechanisms.
In spring 2017, the middle school will embark on its second iteration of the sixth-grade collaborative problem-solving capstone. Spurred on by their students and sixth-grade colleagues, seventh-grade faculty have engaged the center to explore how they might make seventh-grade assessments more meaningful.
Through conversations, consultations, projects, and endeavors, Providence Day’s Center for the Art and Science of Teaching, Learning, and Entrepreneurship continues to wonder how it might catalyze these types of explorations and innovations.