Head of School

Greetings from what has been a temporarily quiet Hillside, as we spanned the weeks between Prize Day and summer camps. Bruce Carlson and our amazing facilities crew are patching, repairing, cleaning and otherwise preparing for our summer camp rentals and the next school year, and our grounds are truly stunning!
 
The topic for this month’s newsletter is our Academic Program, including our new “Block Schedule,” and how we have adjusted to a rapidly changing world while maintaining our strong academic base. I continue to believe that SKS has remained steadfast in our commitment to providing forward-leaning, consistent, innovative educational experiences to our boys. While the world changes around us, our academic program adapts and evolves in ways that prepares our students for ambiguity and unpredictability. 
 
In 1965 Gordon Moore, engineer and co-founder of Intel, projected that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every decade. Such changes in computer technology and capacity would revolutionize what we understand as “knowledge” and what it means to be “educated.” Ten years later he revised his prediction to the doubling of transistors every two years, and this became known as “Moore’s Law.”    

For those of us who are not engineers, to understand Moore’s Law consider the fable of the chess board maker and the king. The maker of the best chess boards in the world went to see the king and presented the king with the most exquisite board ever made. The chess-loving king offered to pay the craftsman for this board and asked him to name the price. The craftsman said he would be honored if the king would simply pay him in grains of rice, putting one grain of rice on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on, doubling the grains of rice on each progressive square until all 64 squares of the chessboard held rice. The king readily agreed, but in so doing bankrupted his empire because on the 64th square of the chess board alone, there would be 263 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice, more than two billion times as many as on just the first 32 squares of the board. On the entire chessboard there would be 264 − 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice. 

I honestly do not know what 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice would look like (Wikipedia claims that the pile would be bigger than Mt. Everest), or even what that number really means, but I can well understand that the rate of continual doubling is mind boggling. 

Moore's Law, and the subsequent advances in technology, have upended the world of traditional education. Architect, inventor and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller applied the ideas behind Moore’s Law to education in what he dubbed the “Knowledge Doubling Curve.” Until 1900, he observed, knowledge was doubling every century.  By the end of World War II, knowledge doubled every 25 years. In the early 1980s it doubled every year, and IBM opines that knowledge is now doubling every twelve hours. 

With so much knowledge available to a vast majority of humans on the planet, what should schools be teaching? We each have more knowledge on our smartphones than is contained in the Library of Congress; how do we sort through it all and know what to teach, how we teach, and why we are teaching it?

From: Learning Solutions Magazine

At SKS we addressed these questions by going back to basics, beginning with our mission, which sets us up well for the 21st century:

South Kent School prepares young men to succeed in college and thrive as thoughtful and engaged citizens in a rapidly changing and intensely competitive world.

We believe that the most important education we can provide our students is largely to teach them the skills they will need to be successful in their world, not in ours. Most experts agree that we are preparing students today for a very different world. “... the people-facing jobs are the ones that are going to stay. So we urgently need to equip young people with those skills — critical thinking, problem-solving and communication,” says Leah Moschella who heads a collaborative effort between the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a nonprofit group, Jobs for the Future. The Institute for the Future (IFTF), a non-profit think tank, predicts that 85 percent of the jobs in 2030 do not yet exist! These ideas summarize the basic thinking behind our curriculum.

We started overhauling our curriculum in 2019 by developing South Kent School’s Seven Principles of Learning, which created a unifying framework that informs us how to teach our students effectively. Through these principles, the faculty guide students in an adaptive and supportive environment to grow in mind, body, and spirit.

South Kent School’s Seven Principles of Learning

1. Boys learn best when their instruction is differentiated to their individual physical, emotional, and cognitive development.
2. Boys learn best in a loving, supportive community where they have meaningful relationships with inspiring and dedicated adults.
3. Boys learn best when skills are developed as the building blocks toward mastery.
4. Boys learn best when they experience their curriculum through vivid and intense activities with frequent practice and thoughtful feedback.
5. Boys learn best through self-reflection, resulting in a deep understanding of their learning and their value within the community.
6. Boys learn best through healthy habits of mind that build a strong sense of self and character.
7. Boys learn best when they imagine, innovate, and create in a community founded on tradition and values.

Our next step was to adopt a “Block Schedule,” the adaptation timeline which was pushed up by the pandemic, and instituted this past fall (September 2020.)  In our block schedule, students take one interdisciplinary course at a time in either Humanities or STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) for each eight-week academic quarter, providing students the opportunities for deeper interactions with the material, their classmates and their teachers. For each eight-week quarter students are in the same class morning and afternoon, five days a week, and end the year with a Humanities credit that covers English and History and a STEM credit that covers Mathematics and Science. In addition to their core Humanities or STEM class, students may take one or two electives in art or language. 

We believe that boys learn best when there are myriad possibilities to become absorbed in topics, rather than cycling through assignments to reach an endpoint in the year. Our curriculum creates time and space for innovative project-based learning, with a focus on skills development that ensures a profound and vivid learning experience, and engages their interests in the subject matter more thoroughly. These discoveries and connections provide robust learning scenarios for lasting understanding.

STEM teacher Michelle Borsavage, explains that this effort to engage the boys with their learning has worked. “Within STEM, the block schedule allows for a deeper dive into lab activities and group work. Students in the learning community have time to pose research questions, design a procedure and collect data within a morning class period, and can then analyze data and draw conclusions in the corresponding afternoon block.” 
 

From our Parents and Students:

Stu Margel, father of Will ‘19 and Dylan ‘24, has seen the development of our academic program firsthand: “After watching one of our older sons go through what we would consider to be a traditional course schedule in high school at SKS, we wish this new block format was available back then for him. Keeping the boys focused on common learning themes with a centralization of either STEM vs Humanities each marking period, allowed them to get the most out of each class rather than continuously jumping from one subject to the next and so on each day. Teaching common elements that naturally go hand-in-hand is a fantastic learning structure for the boys.”

Graeme Russell '24 presenting in class

Graeme Russell ‘24: “Through my own experience, I have really enjoyed the block schedule.  One part of the schedule that worked well for me was the pairing of subjects within the classroom. I found it helpful for subjects that were similar, to be taught together, and subjects that differed, to be taught separately. This allowed me to have a primary focus in class, and it reduced the amount of information being taught to me all at once. This led to less stress within the classroom, and it increased my ability to comprehend the information. In addition to this, the sessions in between my morning and afternoon classes, allowed me to have more time to study, and receive additional help from my teachers when necessary, which helped me maintain success within the classroom.”

Junwei Zhang ‘22: “I really enjoyed South Kent's new approach to the structure of our academic schedule. Essentially, a year-long course is meshed into eight-weeks, which provides us as students a rigorous learning environment that will inevitably pay off once we reach college.”

Our academic program, though geared towards the future, epitomizes and amplifies our 97 year old Trinity of Values: Simplicity of Life, Self Reliance, and Directness of Purpose. As the world changes around us at exponential speed, we remain committed to preparing our students for their future by providing them the timeless skills to be critical thinkers, problem solvers and accomplished communicators, and to do so with the support of a small community.

I hope that many of you will return to the Hillside September 24th - 26th for Alumni Weekend, to see what I have described, above, in action.

As always, please be in touch should you have any questions.  

My very best regards,

Lawrence A. Smith '73
Head of School

Head of School's Reading List:

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions
by Michael Moss

My wife recommended this to me and I could not put it down.  Retracing our evolution as a species and detailing our ingrained desires and wants, author Michael Moss explains how the giant processed food companies take advantage of this knowledge and work to provide products that our bodies tell our brains we “need.” In many ways this is the sequel to Eric Schlosser’s 2012 bestseller Fast Food Nation which, if you have not yet read it, you should.