Poughkeepsie Day School
Strategic Plan
June 2013
Our Mission
Poughkeepsie Day School develops educated global citizens with a passion for learning, leading and living.
Introduction
This strategic plan looks to the future: of Poughkeepsie Day School students and of the school. The plan affirms and builds on the school’s core mission, values, unique strengths and legacy of innovation and change. It is a document that is both a vision for the future and a structure for achieving it.
The goals and direction of the plan are informed by broad community input and consultation, careful research, the findings of a rigorous self-study undertaken as part of the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) re-accreditation process and the ensuing visiting committee report.
This plan is the product of a broad-based collaboration that began in November 2012 with a board of trustees retreat guided by Judy Schectman of Triangle Associates of St. Louis. The plan was developed by a strategic planning task force comprising a 19-member core group: 13 current parents, 8 trustees, 6 teachers, 5 administrators and 4 parents of PDS alumni.
We also benefited from the thoughts and writings of many extraordinary educators and thought leaders; a partial list is included in the appendix.
This plan has 5 points of focus:
- Identity: Our identity as a school and the community we serve and seek to serve
- Program: The program of the school and proposes a design for learning to serve the needs of children now and in their futures; the key elements of that design and their connection to the mission, core values and student outcomes
- Faculty: The importance of teachers as the difference makers in children’s lives; their key professional characteristics and ways to attract, retain, compensate, support and inspire outstanding teachers
- Campus and our facilities: Ways to ensure they will continue to support, enhance and inspire the work of students and teachers
- Economic sustainability: This issue is the bedrock on which all else depends; it calls for careful financial planning, creative thinking and productive work in generating non-tuition revenue
Challenges and Opportunities
Recognizing the changing nature of our world, the plan looks to the future. Clearly and unequivocally, it presents the school with the opportunity to continue to live its mission in new and exciting ways. It is a response to the critical question of how schools ‒ as well as individual students and teachers ‒ learn in an era of rapid and radical change.
The school embraces this challenge to reshape and re-imagine an education for our students that builds on our past as it prepares them for their future. This strategic plan sees learning as a dynamic process of creation, co-creation and re-creation. It proposes an encompassing vision for a learning life and mindset that connects Poughkeepsie Day School to the world. Like our students, the plan will be a work in progress.
Just as the planning process has been a shared responsibility, the implementation of our plan over the coming years also must be a shared undertaking. The administration and faculty are already working to launch the implementation this year of key components of the plan while laying the groundwork, with the trustees, for implementation of others. We are confident that the PDS community response to the plan and its execution will be enthusiastic and supportive. The growth of our annual fund and capital giving will determine our ability to take the initial steps required to put our strategic plan into action.
The purpose of our strategic planning process was to establish an ongoing strategy mindset for PDS. We seek to make our mission, our values, our learning commitments and and our student outcomes explicit. Our community of learners needs to know what we are doing, how we are doing it and why. Our plan then is both a vision for the school and direction for thought and for action with outcomes that can be demonstrated and defended and that are desirable and differentiated.
Our work on this plan began with asking the key questions: Why school and why PDS?
Our work was primarily informed by members of the PDS community who freely shared their ideas and hopes with us and whose thinking and aspirations shaped this plan.
CONTEXT
Era of Change
The premise of this strategic plan is that powerful global forces enabled by technology are rewriting the public and personal rules by which we live and transforming how we work, communicate, do business, plan for the future, what we know, can do and learn. They press forward at an accelerating pace towards a future that we cannot predict. Institutional and social change and disruption are everywhere; education is not immune.
Technological growth ‒ with accompanying social and economic developments and disruptions, both positive and negative ‒ presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities. We have extraordinary tools and technological capacities at our disposal to confront continued social and political upheaval, environmental change and competition for key resources.
We understand that:
- New roles and relationships have emerged for teachers and students and have redefined relationships between learners and knowledge;
- We live in an era of explosive knowledge growth and unprecedented ubiquitous access to information;
- The pace of change is accelerating and is just now taking hold in education. Once launched, an idea can become mainstream faster than ever. Online and blended learning are now a rapid-growth industry. For example, on-demand videos are available for learning anything, from tying a knot to playing an instrument to calculus. Just a year ago, MOOCs were a novelty; now major universities, policy makers and secondary schools must consider their implications; YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google; and Khan Academy’s success in delivering traditional educational content is being matched by other online academies and educational channels offering content by teachers from around the world. In the independent school world there are clear indications that schools are tackling these changes head-on: The Global Online Academy and the Online School for Girls are up and running; the first Online Education Symposium for Independent Schools was held earlier this year in Los Angeles;and Stanford Online High School is now open for business. This is just the beginning.
- Emerging options and shifting realities make possible a world of any-place, any-time, any-pace learning. They allow for global access and connections with collaborators, colleagues, teachers and mentors from around the world. Every consumer of information is a potential creator of knowledge.
- These new realities contradict the model of schooling that resides in our collective memory. Our challenges include making a compelling case for bricks and mortar place-based learning; finding ways to incorporate online and blended learning options within the school program; and how to make effective and constructive use of technology and harness its power in the service of an education that has meaning, relevance and authentic purpose.
These shifts require us to reflect on how we interact with the world and with each other. We need to step back and reflect on human history and on what it means to be human. And this leads to an ongoing focus on the importance of human relationships, face-to-face communication and actively seeking lives in balance. To find that perspective and equilibrium, we need to restore and strengthen our connections with the non-digital world of people and their needs; practical work and the natural environment.
The future of education demands that we rethink, re-imagine and rebuild the fundamental learning relationships among teachers, students and knowledge. It means establishing and affirming a role for schools and teachers in a world of abundant and ubiquitous information where technology can deliver personalized and customized traditional curriculum content more efficiently than dedicated teachers.
A growing consensus of informed voices concludes that many aspects of traditional schooling that most of us knew in the 20th century are no longer relevant, effective or tenable. Many of the skills and aptitudes that allowed people to thrive in the last century are redundant. Much of what was taught, and the way we taught it, no longer applies.
Building on Our Educational Legacy
A PDS education has never been “traditional.” The tools and thinking now at our disposal mean that we can become even stronger in the things we do well and have always espoused: engaged learning, critical thinking and creative collaborative work that changes lives by connecting joy and purpose to learning and effort.
We will continually seek to graduate self-sustaining learners and flexible thinkers, problem solvers who collaborate widely and communicate effectively. We will continue to nurture and support students and teachers as co-creators and co-learners with highly attuned abilities to access, assimilate, question, synthesize, assess and distill information and to be able to communicate, connect and share across boundaries in order to make a creative contribution to the world. We will continue to focus on high level and meaningful academic work and scholarship. These are attitudes, aptitudes, habits and modes of thinking on which our school will focus.
Implications for the Workplace
Traditional concepts of employment are evolving, just as definitions of education are being rewritten. Along with access to the world’s knowledge; instant communications and global collaboration, we see a growing need for creative, entrepreneurial and compassionate approaches to solving contemporary challenges.
John Dewey told us in 1897 that school is a process for living, not a preparation for future living. Education is a process of becoming, not a training ground for the workforce.
That said, it seems clear that the future work world will require new ways of thinking, creativity, intellectual agility, emotional intelligence and a boundless, resilient capacity for learning, unlearning, connection and collaboration.
In 2010, IBM surveyed more than 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 30 industries worldwide. These executives named creativity as the most important quality for successfully navigating what the US Army War College calls a VUCA environment (for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity).
Digital-age literacies clearly must now include:
- STEM literacy: broad-based general knowledge and understanding of how the world works within and across the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. STEM literacy is an interdisciplinary area of study that bridges the four areas; it does not simply mean achieving literacy in each of these strands or silos. A STEM-literate student also is experienced in problem-solving, analytical, communication and technology skills.
- Economic literacy: knowledge of basic economic concepts, personal finance, the role of small businesses and large corporations, and the impact of economic issues and market forces on individuals and society
- Historical literacy: understanding the processes of historical inquiry, our individual and collective past, the human story of the world and its people and change over time
- Media and Visual literacy: the ability to understand, interpret, use, communicate with and create images and video using both conventional and new media
- Information literacy: the ability to find, access, navigate and use information and the ability to evaluate its credibility
- Cultural literacy: the ability to value and respect diversity; awareness of and sensitivity to cultural issues and expression; and effective cross-cultural communication
- Global awareness: an understanding of how countries, individuals, groups and economies are interconnected.
There is a growing consensus around what have become known as 21st-century skills. Test taking is not among them.
Dr. Tony Wagner of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard offers advice to schools on how to develop student skills they will need in a global society. He interviewed over 600 CEOs, asking them the same essential question: “Which qualities will our graduates need in the 21st century for success in college, careers, and citizenship?” Wagner’s list of Seven Survival Skills is a distillation of the outcomes of these hundreds of interviews. Here’s the list:
• Critical Thinking and Problem-solving
• Collaboration Across Networks and Leading By Influence
• Agility and Adaptability
• Initiative and Entrepreneurship
• Effective Oral and Written Communication
• Accessing and Analyzing Information
• Curiosity and Imagination
With the options and demands for college and work undergoing dramatic shifts, we can no longer prepare students according to traditional expectations established in the 19th century. Our students will have the chance — and, increasingly, will be expected — to forge their own paths to an education and in the workplace. Through necessity or by choice, increasing numbers of Americans are becoming freelancers and independent contractors.
This is a challenge and an opportunity. It means seeing education as something we craft, not something delivered pre-packaged.
Implications for Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age
Students
As John Palfry and Urs Gasser explain in Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, the children in our schools today are born into a new culture. Those of us who grew up in an earlier era have a choice. We can opt to adapt to this world, accept that we do not know it as well as our children and look to them to help us learn while we continue to share the values and the experience of the past. Or, we can focus on how good things used to be and resist change. Our students do not have this choice unless they deliberately elect to become hermits. If we wish to connect with our students and help them learn then we must accept that our students are no longer the people the traditional educational system was designed to teach and they do not live in the world that we knew growing up.
Students today have different expectations and experiences than those of earlier generations. They are accustomed to immediate access to information and to using a wide range of tools and resources to share, communicate and learn. Their out-of-school experiences with digital media are often deeply engaging, social, interactive, peer-driven and provide immediate rewards and recognition. This is their milieu and it is one that adults from a different era must strive to understand, take advantage of and help co-navigate. Students have a learning mindset that sees technology as oxygen – the air they breathe. They are connected, mobile, social and entertainment-oriented at an increasingly younger age.
Information that was formerly text-based, linear and sequential and parsed out by experts is now readily accessible, easily shared, open and available in multimedia formats. This is a far cry from waiting to ask a teacher or to visit the library to seek information in an encyclopedia.
And rather than a focus on deferred relevance – “knowing this will help you later” – it is instant and on demand when needed: just-in-time, not just-in-case. Learning takes place not just in school but any-time, any-place, any-space and any-pace.
If this is the worldview of our students then we must rethink our assumptions about teaching and learning. In this new culture how do we best convey the values we cherish, model the ethical conduct we desire and nurture the relationships and communities students need? What tools, habits, attitudes and capacities will they need to enable them to thrive?
The NAIS Guide to Becoming a School of the Future provides insight into a way forward for schools. And theNAIS 2012‒2013 Trendbook provides an overview of the shifting contexts for education with a particular focus on independent schools. If the wave of the future is a changed culture for learning and for entrepreneurship, passion-driven expertise and personal brand identity, then the pressure is on to help individuals develop their individual skill sets, strengths and capacities. The era of industrial standardized education is over. One size never did fit all.
These changes require us to think differently and then act differently. The specific changes for schooling include the following shifts, many of which have been hallmarks of – or resonate with – a PDS education since its founding:
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From: |
To: |
| Teacher-centered and directed | Learning and learner centered |
| Content coverage | Learning by doing and making |
| Memorizing information | Accessing information and putting it to use |
| Teacher as fount and controller of knowledge | Teacher as coach, guide and senior partner in learning |
| Whole-group class configuration of one-size-fits-all | Flexible grouping, dependent on activity, interest and project |
| One way to learn and express understanding | Multiple ways to access and represent knowledge |
| Assessment driven by memorization and recall | Authentic assessment that draws on higher order thinking skills and creativity |
| Separate silos of academic disciplines | Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary connected learning |
| Isolated learner | Connected, networked and collaborative learning |
| Textbook dependent and driven | Multiple sources of information |
| Technology as a scarce resource | Ubiquitous access to tools for communication, collaboration and creation |
| Arts as peripheral luxuries | Arts as the connective tissue of creativity, imagination, intellectual well-being and cognitive growth |
| Recess as a way to let off steam and play as recreation | Physical activity and play integral to mind-body wellness, invention, growth and cognitive functioning |
| A focus on student deficits | Recognition of student strengths and interests as an essential building block for further learning |
| Right answers and an overemphasis on getting things right | Trial-and-error learning that embraces intellectual risk taking and sees failure as information |
| Assessment as numbers, grades and standards and narrow achievement | Assessment based on reality and growth and as conversation about new horizons for learning |
| Student conformity and compliance with set expectations are prized | Student engagement and ownership of learningmatter most |
| Intelligence as measurable and fixed | Neuroplasticity and a growth mind-set |
| Isolated classrooms and schools | Flexible learning spaces and networked institutions |
Consensus on Where to Focus
As educators, we are in the future business, whether we like it or not, because it is where our students will live. And while acknowledging that predictions for the future cannot be guaranteed, we do know that one way to prepare for and shape the future is to start building it now.
As we gathered information from surveys and listening sessions, we were struck by a thematic congruity among our constituents – a continuous thread that can be summed up as ”learning by doing.” It confirms a desire for school to be even more about hands-on life skills and the practical world of self-sufficiency, designing, engineering, making, tinkering, doing, building and creating.
A focus on learning by doing resonates with our progressive legacy as a school where learning has always been active and engagement prized. It also connects with the renewed fervor for authentic learning that is taking root in innovative public and independent schools nationwide and indeed globally.
A second theme was an interest in renewed commitment to creativity and the arts and to the physical and natural world. Calls for sustainability, forging more direct and personal connections with the material and natural world are everywhere. We seem to be entering a new golden age of making to learn and learning to make, with the emphasis on project-based learning, STEM to STEAM, design thinking, makerspaces, tinkering studios, fab labs and school gardens.
We also noted an interest in a strong sense of community based at the school and for connection with our local communities through service learning and partnerships with neighboring organizations and institutions. This concern for place-based learning and service-related skills and connections was linked to the hope that our students will develop a sense of global citizenship, deep cultural awareness and a thorough grounding in the essentials of a liberal education and broadly defined scholarship.
These trends and ideas, so compatible with the PDS’s mission and history, also point to our future direction. The school has always prized active and experiential learning, a progressive legacy that serves us well as we contemplate the needs of the future, one ever more focused on:
- Helping students identify, and then develop, their individual strengths, interests and passions to the highest level
- An expansion of the visual and performing arts program and the integration of creative and inventive work across the curriculum – learning by doing and experience
- Community, the sense of belonging, rootedness and connection through service and partnerships: place-based and face-to-face learning
- Broadening and deepening global awareness and levels of cultural competence: feeling at home in the world
- Environmental stewardship
- Agency: developing in students the capacity to tackle the unknown with courage and confidence and make a creative contribution to the world
These goals are based on certain principles about education, namely that it must:
- Cherish the diversity of individual talent and respect cognitive differences
- Nurture creativity, the imagination and a playful mindset that values and supports the arts, divergent thinking, tinkering and the capacity to adapt and change
- Build community, relationships and the sense of belonging
- Convey that intelligence is not fixed, and that our lives and our intellectual, social and personal growth are not linear and are best measured not by standards but by expanding horizons of what we can accomplish alone and together
- Demonstrate in practice, program and pedagogy the learning values we espouse while establishing a broad-based academic foundation of serious work and scholarship
Every student is an individual on a unique journey in a life that unfolds in ways that can be unexpected, circuitous and complex. The powers of creative imagination for every child must be valued and nurtured.
The Role for School
In the networked world, how we define school and what we know about teaching and learning is evolving. The MacArthur Foundation has identified five great shifts related to learning – all of which are made possible or accelerated by ubiquitous technology and access to information and connection.
Connie Yowell – Director of Education Grantmaking at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation – puts it this way:
Connected learning is an answer to three key shifts as society evolves from the industrial age of the 20th century and its one-size-fits-all factory approach to educating youth to a 21st-century networked society:
1) A shift from education to learning. Education is what institutions do, learning is what people do. Digital media enable learning anywhere, anytime; formal learning must also be mobile and just-in-time.
2) A shift from consumption of information to participatory learning. Learning happens best when it is rich in social connections, especially when it is peer-based and organized around learners’ interests, enabling them to create as well as consume information.
3) A shift from institutions to networks. In the digital age, the fundamental operating and delivery systems are networks, not institutions such as schools, which are one node of many on a young person’s network of learning opportunities. People learn across institutions, so an entire learning network must be supported.
Connected learning is not about technology. The principles of connected learning weren’t born in the digital age, but they are extraordinarily well-suited to it.
Connected learning is not about turning our backs on teachers and schools. Thousands of teachers and educators across the U.S. are working hard, often in the face of adversity, to reimagine learning for the next generation.
Connected learning is also not about throwing out traditional literacy skills. The importance of reading, writing and critical thinking are as important as ever. But so are new literacies like advanced problem-solving and collaboration that will be critical in the increasingly interconnected world we dwell in.
Connected Learning: Reimagining the Experience of Education in the Information Age
These shifts from knowing to doing, from teacher-centered classes to student-centered learning, from the individual to the team, from consumption of information to the making of meaning, from schools to networks and from single-sourcing knowledge to crowd-sourcing are expanded in the modified NAIS sidebar below.
| Old Model | Examples | New Model | Examples |
| Knowing | Memorizing facts for a pen and paper test | Doing | Applying knowledge and skills in a demonstration of learning |
| Teacher-centered | Textbook-derived lecture | Student-centered | Student-led seminar and partner “labs” in all disciplines |
| The Individual | Competition for grades, honor roll, and class rank | The Team | Collaboration in a project-based learning context |
| Consumption of Information | Knowledge is expendable with a short shelf-life | Construction of Meaning | Knowledge is a means to produce long-term meaning |
| Schools | Place-bound: learn inside the box of the classroom | Networks | Schools without borders: learn in the local and global communities digitally and/or via expeditions |
| Single Sourcing | Dated information with single point of view being the source of information and knowledge — the textbook | Crowd Sourcing | Experts with multiple perspectives and points of view produce and curate information — Wikipedia, etc. |
These “shifts” connect with what a Poughkeepsie Day School education has always stood for and what it has always sought to achieve. Connected learning breathes new life into our traditional model and design.
The new roles for educators are as co-creators, thinkers and contributors rather than as gatekeepers, distributors and arbiters of information. And herein lies the new role for school.
Teaching is an art form, not a delivery system: Teachers don’t teach subjects, they teach children. Deep knowledge of, and passion for, academic disciplines must be matched by the understanding of how students learn and by a commitment to creating learning environments that serve students. Teachers and students dwell together in the cultural ecosystem of a school that needs to be rich with opportunities, simultaneously demanding and forgiving; strong in support and deep in empathy and compassion: a place where intellectual risk-taking is just what happens as minds and capacities grow.
Shiny new technologies and ubiquitous access to the world’s knowledge do not automatically translate into self-directed, organized, autonomous, literate, free range learners eager to take advantage of the opportunities.
We need teachers and schools to help students identify needs, find passion and purpose, build the skills of connection in safe and ethical ways, pursue deep interdisciplinary thinking and develop the capacity to persist in the face of difficulty. We need teachers and schools to prepare students not for the world we have known, but for the world they currently inhabit and into which they will emerge.
School must be about what it has always been at its best: a place where children go to learn with others, in real time, face-to face with teachers who inspire them by being learners themselves; a place of shared and mediated experience where students interact with each other and their teachers to find purpose and develop mastery and expertise. School is also a place where students are supported in taking advantage of, and experiencing, online and blended learning opportunities to enrich their education.
The role of Poughkeepsie Day School is to live its mission and help students develop as educated global citizens with a passion for learning, leading and living.
The Plan and Its Goals
A PDS education is a promise for the future that arises from the quality of life in the now. In this context we offer our strategic plan and the following commitments for the future of PDS.
The plan’s five interrelated goals begin with the mission and the values we cherish that reside at the core of our school. At PDS we see school as a place for:
Curiosity, creativity, caring, collaboration, integrity, courage, self-awareness, wonder and connection – where students develop the essential academic, practical and social capacities to make a creative contribution to the world.
We seek to enable students to experience school in ways that will serve them for a lifetime as educated and engaged global citizens who can think, create, share, team, lead and who care to contribute.
Our work is guided by 8 leading questions:
- What is our mission?
- What are our guiding values?
- What is our identity as a school?
- Who attends PDS?
- What are our learning outcomes for students?
- What is the relationship at our school between students, teachers and knowledge?
- What is the PDS design for learning
- What is the PDS difference and why does it matter?
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THE GOALS |
Goal 1: Identity, Community and Communication(Who we are and how we tell our story)
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Goal 2: Program – Creativity and connection; Creative and critical thinking and expression; Learning by Doing.
Key elements and evolving specifics may include: Learning by Doing, Active Engagement, Growth Mind-Set, STEAM, Project-Based Learning (PBL), Design Thinking, Learning to Make/Making to Learn, Transdisciplinary and experiential work, Arts at the Core, Service Learning, Wellness, Active partnerships and strategic alliances with colleges and other institutions and organizations. |
Goal 3: TeachingTeachers as the difference makers in children’s lives and key to change in schools.
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Goal 4: Facilities that Inspire and Enhance; Enable and Support
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Goal 5: Financial Sustainability – Strengthen and diversify resources to achieve our mission and goalsThis goal undergirds all the others and recognizes financial sustainability as the number one priority for the school.Strengthen and diversify resources to achieve our mission and goals and aspirations. The main components are:
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OUR MISSION
Poughkeepsie Day School develops educated global citizens with a passion for learning, leading and living.
OUR VALUES
Curiosity, creativity, collaboration, compassion, connection, courage, contribution, wonder, integrity and self-awareness.
OUR DESIGN FOR LEARNING
The DNA of the PDS Way – a program founded on and driven by these beliefs about learning
- Learning is Playful – A program infused with creativity thinking, is rich with opportunities for artistic expression, imaginative thinking and allows time for experimentation and play. An education that takes advantage of the accidental, forges connections between the disparate, is elastic with opportunity, adapts to circumstances and is sometimes spontaneous and messy.
- Learning is Deliberate – A program that is intentional, challenging and purposeful, that attends to the developmental needs of children and is aligned with student outcomes. A program that draws on the elements of design thinking (empathy, integrative thinking, optimism, experimentation, collaboration) to ensure our students are ready for the world of their future. An education that affords a broad-based foundation of academic pursuit and scholarship and prepares students for success as lifelong learners.
- Learning is Social – A program that understands that learning is a social process and that collaboration, partnership, teamwork and sharing confer purpose and meaning. An education that develops students as educated stewards, followers, leaders and difference makers in their worlds
- Learning is Active – A program that is built around learners constructing their knowledge; that is intellectually and physically active, project based and inquiry driven. An education for the mind and body centered on curiosity, engagement, activity and learning by doing.
- Learning is Relevant – A program based in and connected to real world circumstances and needs. An education that is authentic and personally meaningful.
- Learning is Empathetic – A program that respects and values every child. An education that develops relationships, caring for others, service, a sense of compassion and social and emotional health and awareness.
- Learning is Permeable – A program that is open, interactive, shared and connected. An education that is transdisciplinary, globally-aware, and connected with the ecosystem of a learning world at school and beyond.
- Learning is Deep – A program that fosters deep expertise and immersive exploration of subject matter. An education that is strengths-focused, experiential, passion-driven.
- Learning is Self-Correcting – A program founded on a growth mind-set where every child sets ambitious horizons for success; that teaches neuroplasticity and the science of the brain and knows that failures today do not dictate or preclude future achievements. An education for change that develops persistence and resilience where intellectual risk-taking, trial and error, mistakes and failure are signs of progress, and that what matters is how we move forward and the ends we pursue.
OUR STUDENT OUTCOMES
Anchored by its mission and its values PDS strives to graduate:
Students who are:
- Independent, entrepreneurial individuals
- Engaged and educated global citizens
- Innovative problem seekers and solution finders
- Environmental stewards
- Empowered creative contributors
- Bold Navigators
- Self evolving/ self directed self sustaining learners for life
Best thought of as a series of concentric circles.
The inner core is the Mission
Surrounding the Mission are the Values.
Emanating from the Mission and Values are the Learning Commitments/ Beliefs that drive the Program.
On the outer rim are the Student Outcomes.
RESOURCES and REFERENCES
Our work was informed by the work of many influential thinkers and educators some of whom appear on this list. PDS is above all about learning so we know that this list is incomplete and that our learning will continue. Our thanks to the following:
John Seely Brown,for his work on innovation, creativity, play and the big shift and for his book with Douglas Thomas A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change
Cathy Davidson for her book and her blog Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century
Carol Dweck for Mindset that reports her research into how teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports.
Edutopia and the resources at The George Lucas Educational Foundation
Fielding Nair International for their work in helping schools rethink the learning environment
Howard Gardner for his extensive body of work including on the importance of multiple intelligences and Five Minds for the Future.
Cas Holman on Tinkering and the Art of Play
John Hunter whose work is inspiring and whose visit was a highlight of the 2012-2013 school year
Ideo and Tim Brown on Design Thinking
Henry Jenkins on connected learning and re-imagining a new ecology of education in the information age
Grant Lichtman whose blog The Learning Pond is an ongoing resource and inspiration and whose work with our committee provided a useful burst of creative energy and refreshed thinking
Ewan Mackintosh for his insights into design thinking, school design and educational change
Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager for Invent to Learn and the role of making, tinkering and engineering in the classroom within the progressive tradition of creative schooling
NAIS for its resources and research and work on sustainability and for A 21st Century Imperative: A Guide to becoming a School of the Future and the 2012-2013 Trendbook and Pat Bassett for The Big Shifts and for his many blog pasts and presentations on change and the future in independent schools
The Partnership for 21st Century Schools
Will Richardson for his blog and his book on the changing role of schools in an age of information abundance: Why School?
RISD for STEM to STEAM and their initiative to add Art and Design to the national agenda of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) with the goal of fostering innovation in education and research.
Ken Robinson for Out of our Minds and his talks that emphasis creativity, respect for the diversity of human talent and the need for change
The Third Teacher for their focus on the importance of physical space and using design to transform learning and teaching
Triangle Associates newsletters on strategy and strategy making
Tony Wagner for Rigor Redefined and Seven Survival Skills and for his advice to schools on how to develop student skills they will need in a global society
Judy Willis for her presentations at PDS and for work and that of others in the rapidly developing field of neuroscience
Connie Yowell on re-imagining the experience of education
Yong Zhou for his insight into global learning and global competitiveness
Strategic Planning Team:
Trustee Co-chairs: Mark Stapylton and Julie Stevenson
President of the Board and community trustee: Stan Lichens
Vice-President of the Board and parent trustee Amanda Thornton
Carol Bahruth, Director of Enrollment and Marketing
Chris Bjork, Parent trustee
Ty Brooks, Parent trustee
Mette Coleman, Parent trustee
Laura Graceffa, Science Department Chair
Josie Holford, Head of School
David Jordan, lower school teacher
Debby McLean, Lower School Division Head
Karen Nichols, History and Social Studies department Chair
Andrea Payne, Parent trustee
Shirley Rinaldi, Middle School teacher
Trace Schillinger English and Language Arts department Chair
Ruthie Shaw, lower school learning specialist
George Swain. Middle School Division Head
Elizabeth Vinogradov, High School Division Head
Consultant: Judith Schectman of Triangle Associates of St. Louis
Where learning leads
Poughkeepsie Day School – where learning comes to life and passion finds a purpose
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