How might we continue to evolve and innovate in order to provide an excellent education that prepares students for the future?
The RCDS Institute is an innovation lab for faculty, empowering RCDS teachers to develop and implement ideas that advance the School's mission and values, thereby ensuring ongoing programmatic excellence and transformative experiences for students.
Each year, RCDS solicits Institute proposals from its faculty for projects that extend their passions and ideas beyond their individual classrooms and disciplines. The RCDS administration selects five projects for the Institute to fund and support. Institute fellows have one summer and the following school year to grow their projects from idea to implementation. The Institute is based on the belief that encouraging creativity, innovation, and leadership among teachers is critical to providing an excellent education to students. The RCDS Institute for Innovative Teaching and Learning has overseen 15 faculty-led projects since its launch in 2016.
RCDS is pleased to announce 5 projects for 2019-20 led by 12 faculty:
WALKING THROUGH HISTORY
| How might we engage students in a meaningful discussion about and interaction with social justice, global history, and civil disobedience? |
 | Ron Hanlon Middle School History Teacher |
 | Tammy McKenna Middle School Language Arts Teacher |
 | Kyle Mitschele Middle School History Teacher |
Project Description: This project seeks to more completely integrate the diversity & inclusion, public purpose, and global studies school initiatives into the 8th grade through revamping the Language Arts and US History curricula and developing a new spring trip for 8th grade in the 2019-2020 school year. We aim to provide students and the RCDS community with a deeper understanding of and empathy for such important historical moments as the domestic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the more contemporary issue of mass incarceration by revamping the 8th grade History and English curricula and traveling as an 8th grade class to significant places and museums to make these topics and themes come to life. Rather than just reading about the rich history of the South, students will travel to Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery to see the significant historical sights that they learn about in class, and they will then share what they learned through this immersive experience with the larger RCDS community.
WILD"CHATS"
| How might we harness the power of storytelling in order to bring the entire RCDS community together through the sharing of our profound, important, and life-changing perspectives while, at the same time, keeping the experience personal and intimate? |
 | Jay Gerlach |
 | Joan Kubisch Middle School and Upper School Modern Languages Teacher |
 | Tim Silverman Middle School Spanish Teacher and Upper School Counselor |
Project Description: Our students, faculty, staff, alumni, even parents, have had many powerful and life-changing experiences. Through endeavors such as TED talks, The Moth Radio Hour, and StoryCorps, modern media has taught us the power of the story to build empathy and tear down barriers. Indeed, when we hear and take interest in the experiences of another, we nurture the roots of compassion, tolerance, and understanding that sustain the kind of people we all aspire to be. It is our hope that through WildChats, we can prove that just a few minutes can establish a mindset that lasts a lifetime.
Our plan is to stage and film intimate public speeches or themed conversations that would then be broadcast to the greater community. Through previous opportunities such as "Why am I here" talks at morning meeting and in peer leadership, Wildcats Around the World Roundtables, and the Public Speaking curriculum, we have seen first-hand the effect that both sharing and hearing a story can have on an audience and a community. We will provide the structure and support to those members of our community, young and old, who are interested in sharing their stories. We hope to draw on the range of powerful experiences of the members of our community to provide varied content that would touch on many areas of our school's mission. Stories of struggle, success, failure, history, justice, inclusion are virtually limitless, and all are welcome for this project.
Giving our students this chance to intimately share their stories to a broader audience will cause them to reflect on their own experiences more profoundly and to process and value their story, their adventure, their experience with greater lasting significance in their own lives. Anyone anywhere who watches these WildChats will see how inspiring our students are and will benefit from their experience, perspective, and wisdom.
Robert Coles believes that we enter another person's life through stories, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, believes that "when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise." We agree with them!
CURRICULUM SCOPE AND SEQUENCE: BREAKING DOWN SILOS AND BUILDING CONNECTIONS
| How might we dig deeper into the curricular conversations we are already having while developing connections between and across divisions, disciplines, and with RCDS initiatives, values, and commitments? |
 | Sarah Flynn |
 | Nicole Leath Grade 4 Teacher |
Project Description: Following the 2019-20 Scope & Sequence project through which 100% of the faculty's curriculum has been recorded in Atlas Rubicon, we will turn our focus toward leveraging the full potential of the tool faculty members have all worked so hard to create. We will cultivate opportunities for reviewing the academic curriculum to ensure coherent scope and sequence from Pre-K through Grade 12 and will facilitate energizing conversations that lead to innovations in the curriculum between disciplines and divisions and further integration of the school's initiatives.
IMPROVING THE SCHOOL'S USE OF THE CTP5 (ERB) DATA
| How might we improve the school's use of the CTP5 (ERB) data? |
 | Libby Jelliffe |
.png) | Jamie Radwan Lower School Learning Specialist, grades 3-4 |
Project Description: This project seeks to dig deeper into understanding and analyzing the CTP5 data to promote school growth. Can we find any patterns using the CTP5 data? How can we maximize the use of this data? And, lastly, let's re-evaluate why and how we use this test.
CLASSROOM CANDIDS: A YEAR OF COLLECTING, DOCUMENTING, AND PRESENTING STUDENT WORK VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
How might we showcase the talents of our students and faculty to a wider audience? |
 | Jennifer Doran |
 | Gail Sestito Middle School and Upper School Modern Languages Teacher |
Project Description: As teachers we know it is hard to visualize the volume of learning activities that take place at RCDS on a daily basis. With over 900 students enrolled in 150 different courses across all 3 divisions, is there a way to capture everyday learning and share it online with the broader RCDS community? Our project Classroom Candids will present an in-depth look at what students learn inside the classroom. By applying the newfound prevalence of social media in education combined with the power of images, the goal of our project is to visit a variety of courses, to snap photographs, film short video clips, and interview students and teachers about the work they do. We hope we get the chance to partner with you to help share the powerful daily work you do with your students!
For more information about the RCDS Institute for Innovative Teaching and Learning, visit ryecountryday.org/institute or contact Eliza McLaren at eliza_mclaren@ryecountryday.org.
