Director of Counseling and Wellness

Back-to-school excitement? Back-to-school butterflies? Back-to-school dread? Returning to school after an action-packed summer can bring up some big feelings! Here are some tips for easing into the new school year:

1. Open up the conversation. If you haven’t already, check in with your student about the upcoming school year. Whether your student is a youngster heading to school for the first time or a seasoned student, your child will have thoughts! For young students remember that you can use drawing and play to learn about how your child imagines school might be. For older students, you might ask “What are you most looking forward to in school this year?” “What worries you?”  or “What do you hope is different this year from last?” 

2. Prepare! Children thrive when they feel confident that they know what to expect and that they have what they need to be successful. Read books about going to school, practice routines, try on uniforms, visit the campus, even come up with a few icebreaker questions students can ask if they’re feeling shy. 

3. Don’t forget the importance of sleep. Now is the time to start adjusting bedtimes to help make sure your student wakes for school feeling recharged. Limit screen time in the hours leading up to bed and consider keeping screens out of bedrooms in the evenings. 

4. Get connected. It can be helpful to connect your student with a buddy if they’re feeling nervous about coming on the first day. Can you carpool with a friend? Make plans to arrive around the same time as a trusted classmate? You might also consider connecting with your student’s classroom teacher or with me, the Director of Counseling and Wellness, for bigger worries that require a bit of extra support and care.

5. Relax and smile! Your child looks to you for how to react in new situations. You have the opportunity to model being cool, calm, and collected. Not sure about how to do something? Let your child watch you ask for help! What a great lesson. Notice your child feeling worried or sad about the end of summer? Acknowledge that all feelings are okay and consider setting some goals or creating an inspirational motto for the year. Smile and know that it’ll be a great school year.

The post 5 Tips for a Successful Back-to-School Transition appeared first on Charles Wright.

Charles Wright Academy is proud to welcome three new members to our board of trustees for the 2023-24 school year. Our board exists to make decisions and take action to ensure the viability of Charles Wright’s mission into the future, and we are tremendously grateful for the time and commitment made by our alumni, parent, and community member Trustees. Please join us in welcoming Aimee Allen P’19, Guillermo Chacón P’11 ’34 and Emily Happy P’32 as our newest trustees.

Aimee Allen P’19

Aimee Allen M.Ed. has served as the Head of School at Harbor Montessori School in Gig Harbor since 2013, and was also on the faculty since 2006. She has been an instructor for the Montessori Education Institute of the Pacific Northwest since 2011. Aimee serves on the boards of the Washington Federation of Independent Schools and the American Montessori Society. Aimee loves running, writing, and spending time outdoors with her family. 

She is a mom to a CWA alum (Maddee ’19) and is excited to give back to the Charles Wright community.

Dr. Guillermo Chacón P’11 ’34

Guillermo Chacón was born and raised in San Jose, Costa Rica. Dr. Chacon is Board Certified by the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. He is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons and the American College of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons. Dr. Chacon is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Washington. 

He is the father to Cristina and Mariana ’11, and his sons Javier ’34 and Rafael (future Tarrier).

Emily Happy P’32

Emily Happy is a Puget Sound native with deep roots in the community. For 20+ years, she has dedicated her career to service, leading projects to support people in her community. As a nonprofit strategist and fundraising consultant for the past 9 years, Emily helps organizations thrive and build capacity for their world-changing work.

​

A past South Sound Business 40-Under-40 award winner and Bank of America Emerging Leader, Emily currently serves as past president of the Association of Fundraising Professionals South Sound, vice chair of the Board of Trustees of Central Co-op, and member of the board of Friends of the Children – Tacoma. She is, most importantly, mom to Devan ’32.

The post Welcome to Our Newest Trustees appeared first on Charles Wright.

For many years, students in history class with David Adams have utilized the Harkness Table pedagogy to engage in discussion about their lessons, but one thing was missing until now – a Harkness Table!

At long last, students in Dr. Adams’s class have a brand new modular Harkness table to use for group discussions. 

The Harkness Table method was designed at Phillips Exeter Academy as a tool for promoting meaningful discussions and critical thinking. The table is designed to facilitate student-centered discussions, with the teacher acting as a facilitator rather than a lecturer. Students sit around the table and engage in a discussion on a given topic or text, with the teacher providing guidance and support as needed.

Dr. Adams began using this pedagogy in the early 2000s while teaching AP United States History. Rather than lecturing at the front of the room, he said he would have his students “go through the texts and pull apart the arguments being made.” 

The Harkness Table is particularly effective for high school students because it allows them to develop critical thinking skills and gain a deeper understanding of the material. Rather than simply regurgitating information, students are encouraged to analyze, question, and challenge ideas. This type of discussion helps students to develop their ideas and opinions and to think critically about the world around them.

Joe Romano, CWA’s Director of Innovation, is working with faculty to utilize the Harkness Table method in more classrooms at CWA. “The Harkness Table method increases student learning around the Portrait of a Tarrier in a very dynamic mode. Students aren’t offered a polished presentation. They’re listening, responding, building on one another’s ideas, and diving deeply together to create meaning. It especially maximizes the communicator trait (practices effective listening, expresses ideas clearly),” he said.

In addition to promoting critical thinking and communication skills, the Harkness Table also helps to develop leadership skills. Because the teacher acts as a facilitator rather than a lecturer, students are responsible for leading the discussion and keeping it on track. 

“Students also develop the Tarrier Trait of collaborator (knows how to lead, how to share leadership, and to follow),” Mr. Romano added.

“Teaching in a discussion-based classroom requires students to find ways to work collaboratively to understand a text.  It teaches them how to disagree without being disagreeable and how to think on their feet.  Reading a text and coming up with your own interpretation is always expected in a classroom but being given the opportunity to see how other students approach the same text can be challenging.  For some students, it can help them raise the bar for their expectations, and, for others, it can help them see an alternate perspective.  In the perfect environment, it can also help students develop a greater sense of empathy and allow them to find ways to help raise the level of a discussion to a higher academic plane,” Dr. Adams said.

Mr. Romano added, “We design challenge spaces at every level of the CWA experience to cultivate these skills, and Harkness is one of the most dynamic challenge spaces, as it is fluid, evolving, and complex to navigate. It’s a mode of convening CWA learners will see in higher ed as undergrads and graduate students, and it’s one they’ll continue to create and contribute to as professionals, whether as part of a startup refining a value proposition or legal team developing a case.”

While Dr. Adams has been facilitating these discussions with his students for many years, he hasn’t had the proper furniture, but rather a hodgepodge of tables pushed together. 

Of the new table, he said, “It will give the students a sense of this being a different type of class from the moment they step into the space.  Instead of the same desks arranged in a different fashion, this will be a visible cue that the expectations and interactions are going to be very different from the typical classroom.”

To further CWA’s use of the Harkness Table method, on June 16, Becky Moore, co-founder of the Exeter Humanities Institute will visit campus to conduct a professional development workshop for 15 CWA faculty.

###

The post CWA invests in the Harkness Table pedagogy for Upper School students appeared first on Charles Wright.

Every child has an individual story. Our job is to help them write their story, facilitating learning to fill in the detail, color, and texture of their story. These details of each child’s story are rooted in their identity. Answering the question, “Who am I?” is a lifelong pursuit. Seeking those answers often starts with looking in the mirror and discovering that person who is looking back.

Why are my eyes blue? My hair is curly, but theirs is straight. I am taller than you are; why? You like oranges, but they taste strange to me. In my home, we celebrate the Solstices; you celebrate Hanukkah. I have a dog; you have horses and goats, and so on.

Any of these statements may be true for an individual child. From a broader sense, the family contributes heavily to a child’s individual story. Each child’s detail, color, and texture is given context through their learning about what their family finds important, chooses to celebrate, and how they choose to live every day. Children are full of questions about the world around them. They notice nuanced differences between each other. Family pictures in the classroom open a window to other cultures, family structures, traditions, and identities.

When children notice these differences, we share in their wonder, validate their curiosity, and answer based on what we also notice.

The CWA Inclusion Statement is a foundational document for

our classroom and atelier pedagogy. Everyone is welcome here. One of the first observations we often witness is different skin tones. Our physical appearance is deeply tied to our identity and something everyone notices. Children are deeply curious about the nuances of skin tone and color, often very aware of both subtle and bigger differences. We sit with children and support their noticing. We may look deeper at our individual characteristics while we do self-portrait work. This week in the atelier begins the next iteration. Our own skin tone paint.

In the atelier this week, the Red Cedar and Maple classrooms investigated a part of their identity by representing their individual skin color in a paint mixture. The children all began with the same paint in their jar: brown. The brown paint represents melanin, the pigment we all have in our skin. The table contained the jars with brown paint, white and brown paint in large squeeze bottles, and red and yellow paint in smaller squeeze bottles to represent the undertones of our unique skin. By carefully selecting tones and undertones, thoughtfully squeezing paint into their jar, and checking against their skin, the children ended our session with a jar full of paint that felt like them.

Most interesting, though, was the conversation that floated up from this identity work: who am I? Who are you? Who are we in relation to one another? Our similarities shone as we all used the same four ingredients, and our individuality was demonstrated in each of our unique end products. The most powerful moment was toward the end of our session when the children brought their jar up to be capped, each child confidently stating, “This color feels like me,” and reverently praising their classmates’ work. The foundations for classroom community and identity have begun.

The post Inside the Atelier – Learning About: Me appeared first on Charles Wright.

By Joe Romano,
Director of Innovation

A single light focuses the audience’s attention on a table set at the center of the Donn Laughlin Theater. A senior lays out their notes, shifts in their seat, and prepares to defend a yearlong quest for knowledge in front of faculty, families, and peers. Over the next 30 minutes, they field questions about the decisions, challenges, and results they discovered through their research in our Humanities Capstone and Science Research courses. The audience leaves inspired by how confidently and cogently these scholars speak about their learning journey, and the nuance and complexity they encountered throughout their year’s work.

Coached by expert faculty, students develop studies ranging from “Examining the Impact of CaCl2 & MgCl2 Concentrations on Double Transformation Efficiency in E. coli” to “Contacting the Spiritual Past: How 17th and 18th Century Spiritualism Influenced Feminism Throughout America.” These topics are highly meaningful, both to the students who selected them and to the wider community of scholarship in which our students engage. The results are also stunning, both in the nuance and complexity our students navigate, as well as how nimbly and confidently students respond to questions about their year’s work. As students stand in front of a community and present all that they have immersed themselves in over many months, they reveal how much our learners thrive under the rigor of the Charles Wright experience.

Ultimately, this is work that matters. To the learners we cultivate and celebrate, as well as to the communities that are continually provoked and delighted by what our students set their learning at the service of accomplishing. Each year, we bear witness to the degree our seniors have flourished in Charles Wright’s Portrait of a Tarrier (the qualities we nurture and challenge students to develop during each step of the learning journey, from Beginning School to Upper School). Our community’s quality of our Thinkers, Innovators, Communicators, Collaborators, Explorers, and Stewards is phenomenal. They thrive in the capstone experiences described above, and they thrive in our Senior Spark projects, where students develop an array of impact projects, whether composing original film scores or performing complete energy-efficiency audits of our campus. They’re intensely evident in the incredible art exhibitions, ensemble concert performances, and theatrical productions we offer throughout each school year.

While the senior year at Charles Wright represents the apex of work that matters to our community, every grade level offers experiences that epitomize Charles Wright’s mission to inspire active, joyful learning. First graders study nutrition, food justice, and plant cultivation as a means to design a yearly farmer’s market. Sixth graders showcase emerging skills as professional photographers and essayists as they study community and identity through literature and social studies. Eighth graders learn to create logarithms and tables to calculate the potential return on investment–and the impact on carbon emissions–of transitioning from a gas-powered vehicle to an electrified car. Each grade prepares learners for the academic demands they will face in the future. And at every step of the Charles Wright learner journey, we challenge our students to find ways they can apply their learning in meaningful ways.

Hands-on, experiential learning has been a part of the fabric of a CWA education for decades. To deepen our ability to design active, joyful learning experiences, Charles Wright has partnered with PBLWorks, the international leader in designing rigorous, Gold-Standard project-based learning experiences that develop critical academic knowledge and skill alongside the 21st-century learning skills represented in our Portrait of a Tarrier.

Project-Based Learning is a teaching method in which students engage in rigorous college-prep academics by actively applying their emerging knowledge to real-world and personally meaningful projects.

This may look like world language students creating informational brochures for migrant workers to help them navigate local services available to them. Or, this may look like mathematics students applying geometric modeling to redesign a product’s packaging to reduce the amount of waste produced in shipping.

Each of these elements combines to develop abilities in critically important areas of academics while they engage in personally meaningful learning experiences that also develop 21st-century skills and impact their wider communities. Charles Wright’s partnership with PBLWorks will nurture and challenge our curriculum to build on our best-in-class experiential education programming, providing all students the opportunity to take on work that matters to themselves, their communities, and the futures they might encounter. Project-based learning is transformational: students have repeated opportunities to apply their learning to the real world. By taking on projects and challenges that ask them to embody the artist, designer, scholar, engineer, policy analyst, activist, financial planner, or any number of pursuits they might encounter in their time beyond Charles Wright, our students have hands-on experiences that develop their sense of purpose and personal possibility alongside their deep and rigorous academic abilities.

Academic Achievement in Project-Based Learning

A dominant body of research also proves the efficacy of a project-based learning approach to developing the academic skills they need in the near future. In 2021, researchers at the University of Southern California found an 8% increase in the pass rate in project-based versions of Advanced Placement U.S. Government and Advanced Placement Environmental Science for the 3,600 students involved in the study. Likewise, a Michigan State study on project-based learning in the elementary science classroom found an 8% increase in science assessments for third graders, regardless of socioeconomic status or reading level.

PBLWorks continues to partner with organizations like the College Board and Advanced Placement to develop a curriculum that serves both rigorous academic outcomes and the broad capacities needed for learners to thrive in the 21st century.

Edith Ackerman, an education researcher who spent the bulk of her career with the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, once offered that… “Learning is less about acquiring or transmitting knowledge than it is about collectively designing a world that is worth living in.”

When we create experiences for our kindergarten artists to design their own variety of apples based on research into pomology, when we ask Middle School artists to develop amazing pieces of wearable art inspired by extensive interviews with clients, when we challenge Upper School scientists to develop arsenic sensors to better monitor water quality in the South Sound, or when we ask language learners to navigate through communities that rely on their target language, we invite learners into rigorous experiences that prepare them their academic futures while also helping them develop the confidence to use that learning to shape a world worth living in.

The experiences above are a part of a rich legacy of learning Tarriers encounter. Our work with project-based learning will further enrich the learning we offer our Thinkers, Communicators, Collaborators, Explorers, Innovators, and Stewards at every stage in the learner journey we offer at Charles Wright.

The post Work That Matters appeared first on Charles Wright.