Center for Teaching & Learning

2/2/24 - When The Field Comes To Us

As most of you already know and have experienced, CTL is deeply committed to students having hands-on, active, and participatory experiences of learning. Often, these take place in the field. Students and teachers decamp to a location to view geological formations, meet with experts, tour historical sites, and perform scientific experiments. 

This week at CTL, our hands-on experiential learning came to us! 

On Monday, families cooked and set up a fabulous feast featuring modern approximations of recipes from ancient Greece. Food is a deeply relevant part of culture, revealing not only the ingredients available to a group of people, but often other aspects of the group’s values or practices. And trying food that is unfamiliar is a great experiment for students in stepping outside of their comfort zone. Somehow, it seems so much easier when we all do it together. On Monday, the line stretched into the Writing Room as everyone got food including lentils, goat, pork, feta cheese, spanakopita, baklava, ambrosia, anchovies, and lots of other delicious items. Plates were full and many students returned for seconds. Thank you very much to Ginny and Roosevelt Bishop, the feast’s organizers, and to all the families who contributed (which was just about everyone). 

On Tuesday, Northern Stars Planetarium came to CTL, inflating the dome in the Barn to help students experience the night sky during the day. The K-4 looked at the seasonal night sky and discussed constellations, visible planets, meteors, the Moon, eclipses, and the northern lights. I don’t know about in your house, but our dinner table conversation was brimming with new facts on Tuesday night. The 5-8 program focused on solar and lunar eclipses in addition to stars and helped students get excited for the eclipse coming on Monday, April 8. CTL teachers found many ways throughout the fall to bring the solar system and galaxy into the classroom, but this dome experience felt like a technological and an educational wonder wrapped in one, right here in the daytime at CTL! A big thank you to John Meader, owner/educator of Northern Stars Planetarium.

On Wednesday, Dr. Nick Gallagher (parent of Violet and Quinn) visited the 3-4 and helped to deepen their study of the human body. The class discussed the heart and the circulatory system. See Jill's Highlights for more details of this engaging hands-on learning experience, and thanks to Nick for sharing his expertise. Several other physician parents will be visiting other classes soon. 

As you can see from the pictures above, today was Stuffie Day at CTL. A beloved CTL tradition, students bring their stuffed animals to school for the day. Students wrote poems about or to their stuffies, read to them, and introduced them to all their friends and their friends’ stuffies. I even saw stuffies being used as human shields during an intense PE class. While this isn’t necessarily ‘the field’ coming to us, I do think it epitomizes another deep aspect of CTL’s culture. CTL invites kids to share the things that are important to them - experiences, people, pets, things they love. Workshop as an educational philosophy centers around student voices and student choices. Stuffie day validates childhood interests and affirms that what kids think is important is also valuable to the adults at CTL. And it’s just joyful to see the kids share a piece of their home world with everyone at school. It’s important to make room for joy and celebration, and I love that at CTL we can do that in a way that emphasizes imagination, comfort, and being a kid.
Take care and keep in touch,
Katy