Igniting the Spark

MODELING THE WAY

“Life-long love of learning” is a core tenet of our mission and philosophy, and Tabor faculty strive to model it in their own work. Faculty participation in professional growth and development opportunities has increased substantially in the last five years. These days, our teachers are routinely learning about neuroscience in the classroom each summer at the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning; they are doing personal development around issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion through Diversity Directions and the Multicultural Teaching Institute; they are developing their listening and counseling skills at the Stanley King Counseling Institute, and so much more. Each August, our teachers return to campus ready to test and tinker with new approaches in the classroom, integrating the forward-thinking ideas of their summer development with their existing classroom practice. It is this same willingness to grow and explore that we want to foster in our students.

Back in the classroom, faculty serve as enthusiastic ambassadors to their disciplines, helping kindle that fire Yeats (or Plutarch!) references. We see the important impact of this enthusiasm again and again in the student responses to course feedback surveys, where they often note how clearly passionate our teachers are for the subjects they teach. That excitement, that enthusiasm, they note, can be inspiring and motivational—it can catch like fire!

PROVIDING THE TOOLS

As our students make their way through our core curriculum, our efforts focus on developing the skills of the discipline, using traditional content to hone skills in writing, analysis, critical thinking, problem-solving. We want our students to learn to persevere, interrogate ideas, view problems from multiple perspectives. We want our students to practice thinking and approaching challenges in discipline-literate ways—to look at math as a mathematician would, to take on history with the mindset and thinking strategies of an historian, to approach language learning not as a series of grammatical rules to be absorbed but as an invitation across a cultural threshold.

Our schedule change in 2017-18 created expanding learning opportunities in the form of 75-minute classes, giving teachers and students more time to experiment with cross-disciplinary work, breaking down the traditional barriers between disciplines, and showing students that their learning was never intended to be siloed in neat categories of English, math, science, and history. As students have had a chance to see cross-disciplinary work in action, they have begun to approach their independent work with a cross-disciplinary lens.

EXPERIENCE AND EXPOSURE

An advantage to independent schools in general, and boarding schools in particular, is the opportunity to experience a broad range of coursework and co-curricular experiences that allow students to explore nascent interests and develop budding passions. Taking it a step further, the boarding environment allows us to create opportunities for students to explore new areas in their free time through opportunities like Open Art Studio or Open MakerLab. Students may sign on to a single ceramics class as a 9th grader on a whim and find themselves enthralled by the limitless potential that medium offers. Vyper LaTullipe ’19 is a great example—a chance placement in Introductory Ceramics led to an award-winning ceramics career during his time at Tabor. Having discovered his passion, he intends to make a career of ceramics and is off to Alfred University’s prestigious BFA program this fall. Vyper’s senior project explored tile-making techniques across several cultures, and the resulting installation adorns the halls of our language wing.

We often tell prospective families that one of Tabor’s advantages is that we have “a small school feel and a big school’s catalog.” By that we mean that we are fortunate to offer a wide breadth and depth of classroom experiences, giving students the opportunity to stretch their skills and develop new skills and interests. Water enthusiasts can explore marine and nautical sciences. Tinkerers find their way to the MakerLab. Budding computer programmers can take on robotics in the winter. Housed within the “traditional” academic subjects are more opportunities to expand horizons. Tabor Spanish classes have been routinely involved in tutoring work at the New Bedford Center for Economic and Community Development. Last term, a Spanish 4 class spent their time learning about and understanding the needs of native Spanish speakers in the New Bedford community. They applied design thinking principles to create detailed project proposals and budgets for initiatives that would support that community, and as a capstone, they presented their work (this time, in English) to a panel of city representatives.

While many students arrive to campus with marine science squarely in their sights, others find a spark of inspiration in unexpected places. Gabby Barresi ’19 signed on for Mechanical Engineering just because she figured it would be good to take a class in the MakerLab. What she got was exposure to tools and software and real-world problem solving, including an iterative approach to troubleshooting her design for “The Claw” with classmate Christine Steege ’20. She found herself applying that interactive approach in later classes and credits her engineering experience with developing that point of view.

And even beyond the classroom, through clubs, internships, and off-campus travel, students have a chance to get excited about a project or an idea and pull it into their own academic orbit. We’ve had students interning at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, linking up with young businesses and entrepreneurs at Groundworks in New Bedford through an Entrepreneurial Club, and planting Staghorn coral “trees” in the Bahamas through our REEF program at the Gerace Research Center. Each of these exposures has the chance to ignite a spark in our students and become a flame that will burn long after their time at Tabor has ended.

READY FOR TAKEOFF

When genuine curiosity takes hold, some students find themselves beyond our central curriculum creating opportunities to pursue their own unique interests. Independent study and senior projects have long been seen as an avenue for students to pull together their learning experiences over their four years at Tabor and put them in service to a personal passion or interest. In some of our best projects, students integrate interests from two seemingly divergent fields into a unique exploration. This year, Anna Douglas ’19 took her passion for art and photography and applied it to microscopy, producing stunning, colorful images of microscopic natural art (seen on the inside front cover of this issue of Tabor Today). Says Douglas, “The combination of science and art had not really crossed my mind until we explored the connections between subjects in my Honors Precalculus class where we completed a project using the MakerLab…the combination between [math and design] made me itch to connect more subjects.”

Even within our available courses, more and more classes are incorporating choice and independence in their project work. For example, in Aquaculture, students design and build their own aquaponics systems; in Advanced Engineering Design, students identify a unique problem to solve, then design, prototype, and troubleshoot a unique solution.

Our Historical Research Pro-Seminar debuted in 2018-2019, and provides the time, opportunity, and challenge to some of our best history students to identify a subject of personal interest, complete an extensive literature review, and spend most of the year developing and writing an original research paper. Jackson Reydel ’19 (pictured above) spent his time in the course researching, analyzing, and writing about the changes in professional baseball over the past 40 years, taking his abiding love for the sport and applying it to analyzing continuity and change over time, one of the major standards of Tabor’s history curriculum. His resulting paper, “The Limitations of ‘Moneyball’ and Baseball’s Analytics Revolution,” along with a number of his peers’ papers, was submitted to The Concord Review for publication consideration.

Our students are being educated today in a time of great societal change. The skills that will be required of them in college and beyond defy the rote knowledge and routine approaches that marked some of our own secondary school experiences. Curiosity, cultivated and supported, can become a foundation for a lifetime of critical thinking, of patient problem-solving, and yes, of a life-long love of learning. The Tabor students mentioned here, and others like them, have used the tools they’ve developed to weave together their interests and their academic pursuits in a way that tells us that they will take their love for learning with them. It is our greatest challenge, and our greatest goal, to see this core value of our school’s mission statement realized in each of our graduates.