Trustees of Nashoba Brooks School
The Board of Trustees is the governing body of Nashoba Brooks School. The Board adopts a clear statement of the school’s mission, vision, and strategic goals and establishes policies and plans consistent with this. The Board of Trustees focuses on governance; i.e., financial and policy matters, assuming primary responsibility for the preservation of capital assets and endowments, and participating actively in fund raising. The day-to-day running of the school is the responsibility of the professional educators. Although Trustees are concerned about the life of the school today, the main focus is on strategies for ensuring that Nashoba Brooks has a healthy and successful tomorrow.
Please see “Schooling in the Twenty-First Century: An Evening with Ted and Nancy Sizer,” an article that describes Nashoba Brooks trustees engaged in a discussion of issues with these two well-known educators.
The Board’s composition reflects the strategic expertise, resources, and perspectives (past, present, future) needed to achieve the mission and strategic objectives of the school, including those of the Head of School, and the President of the Parents’ Association during their respective tenures.
President Paul Parisi Vice President Vice President Barbara Southwell Treasurer Gordon Nelson Secretary Bob Jones
Head of School E. Kay Cowan PA President Susanne Schoeller Fran Brown Pam Callahan Priti Chatter William Crowley Alice Flint Patrick Flynn Jen Chun Kelt Robert Kramer Mary Modahl Raj Nair Connie Noble Sarah Robertson Susan Roddy Patti Satterthwaite Robin Shapiro Margaret Sullivan Scott D. Wiggins
Schooling in the Twenty-First Century
An Evening with Ted and Nancy Sizer
By Elizabeth Lutyens
At the December, 2003, meeting of the Nashoba Brooks Board, trustees were joined at the table by legendary school reformers Ted and Nancy Sizer. Their presence was, of course, no surprise. In fact, during the weeks preceding the visit, trustees had steeped themselves in Sizer wisdom, namely a chapter on intellectual “grappling” from the Sizers’ most recent book, The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract. They were asked to consider the Sizers’ philosophy in tandem with a close look at the educational program at Nashoba Brooks.
To guide trustees’ thinking, Assistant Head of School Neal Brown suggested a review of the Mission Statement and the four curriculum overview documents that faculty presented to parents in the fall. He also posed two “essential questions”:
What does it mean to be an educated person in the 21st Century?
How does our school’s program prepare students for life beyond Nashoba Brooks?
In introducing Ted and Nancy, Neal Brown was in familiar company. He has worked with the Sizers in his roles as a founder and current board member of the National Center for Independent School Renewal, an organization that grew out of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and as one of the original 100 educators trained to be a coach in the Critical Friends process, a program of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. He also interned with the Sizers when they were Co-Principals of the Parker Essential School.
Neal pointed out that, although their roots were in private schools—Nancy at the Oxford School (now Kingswood-Oxford, Hartford, Connecticut) and Ted at the Foote School in New Haven—their chief passion over the last twenty years has been public education reform. [Please see biographical sketches, this page.] Even after Ted has supposedly “retired,” following a twelve-year tenure at Brown, the Sizers were, in Neal’s words, “instrumental in launching the Parker Essential Charter School, one of most impressive public schools in the state, or even in the nation. The books they have written—and their ideas and innovations—have addressed the frustrations and fired the dreams of parents, teachers, and administrators everywhere.”
As a prelude to the evening’s discussion, faculty member Jan Maguire illustrated the way in which Nashoba Brooks students are encouraged to grapple with the complexity of learning and the respect that their teachers show for this effort. In introducing a video presentation of “grappling” during a math class she had taught that day, she said, “Gender research informs us that capable girls have more of a tendency to drop math courses than do their boy peers. The Nashoba Brooks curriculum exposes students to symbolic language at early stages of their math learning. By encouraging girls to wrestle with algebraic ‘mumbo jumbo,’ we help them to experience the algebraic structure as well as the math itself.” She then showed a scene during which sixth grade girls explored the concept of zero. The students took an active role in exploring approaches to the lesson, analyzing what they were learning, and responding eagerly to Jan’s characteristically humorous prompts (“Tell me if this gets boring,” she says, while filling the board with a long string of many numbers plus zero, all of which boringly equal zero), and acting as coaches for each other.
Following the video, as an example of “complex learning,” Jan shared with the Sizers and trustees a “pantoon,” a poem that has much in common with mathematical patterns. She posed some of the same questions about it that she asks of her sixth grade students, for example:
—Analyze the form of the poem and using variables (letters), explain the pattern that makes this poem interesting.
—Consider this statement. There are few things in the universe that are both linear and circular at the same time. How might a pantoon be considered linear and circular?
After those gathered around the Board meeting table had pondered a while in silence, Nancy Sizer spoke up: “I think we should all spend the rest of the evening doing this.” She added, “Anne DeBoalt [Nashoba Brooks teacher and Coordinator of Student Services] told me that even the very young students here learn to solve math problems in a number of ways. I thought, What a great thing. We need to ask ourselves not just ‘Can the students do math? but also ‘Can they explain it?’ ”
Launching the group into discussion about today’s educational world, Nancy continued, “From my own childhood and school days, there were two things absolutely for sure. There was not that much information in school, but what there was, the teacher would introduce to me. I could hear about China, for example, because of the war, but anything deeper would need to come from her. She was the funnel of whatever came to me. And now we’re in an age where kids the night before might have been exposed to something true or fascinating that I [as a teacher] wouldn’t know about at all. Our job now is not to build on a scarcity of information, but to help people deal with large amounts. How do we use the Internet, some sites which do not offer accounts as accurate as they might be? It’s a different job today for teachers. The student today understands ‘I don’t hear just from Mrs. Jones about China, and her ideas about it might be different from mine.’ We need to honor what children bring to the classroom. Nowadays I think a principal wandering around should hope to hear a number of voices, and not just that of the teacher. You learn better when you’ve heard yourself at least once talk about something. We need to use to our advantage what the current information-rich climate gives us.”
Ted Sizer offered his thoughts on the role of the teacher today. “The book from which the chapter on grappling is taken rests on the principle that, whatever their age, kids watch us all the time and learn. Those of us in the school world are conscious of signals arising from our very being, the way we carry ourselves, the way we draw lines, the things we honor or cherish. Substance may be less important than the way we act. So many good people say one thing and do another—there are teachers who aren’t scholars but expect students to be, people who talk each other down. Schools I admire are those with adults in good community, so that kids can see a principled group of grownups acting in ways that radiate grappling with ideas, coping with fear, exhibiting the least possible amount of bluffing instead of cutting close the truth or actually lying. The book arose from a lot of listening to and worrying about adult communities. Every wise school looks inward.”
He next emphasized the importance of “inculcating habits of mind.” This was a theme familiar to his listeners, since “habits of character, habits of mind” is the linchpin of the Nashoba Brooks statement of philosophy. “Lifelong learning,” he said, “does not square with the regurgitation of material—with testing. This goes back to Socrates. What are the habits of kids moving through the school, after graduation from school? Are they questing, respectful of ideas of others, respectful of disagreement, of what they know and don’t know? Habits are teachable. Even though it’s difficult to think of a daily/weekly/ monthly march through school in terms of habits as opposed to history, which was my school experience, habits are more important.”
Nancy adds, “Habits of mind means doing your absolute best. Teachers should be inviting the kids to add to the mix, just as we saw on Jan’s video. When her students go off to algebra and geometry and get complicated math terms thrown at them, they are not going to forget what they did in sixth grade with Jan.”
A board member described habits of mind as “an evolved form of teaching and education,” and wondered if, as such, might it be unrealistic for many public schools and therefore “achievable only in rarified situations”?
Ted answered, “Small schools. It’s a matter of scale. The growing record of small public schools is very encouraging.” He mentions Boston’s Mission Hill School, whose co-principal, Deborah Meier, joins the Sizers as a leading advocate of small school size. (No secondary school, they propose, should exceed 300 students). Ted continued, “You can’t help students grapple or practice good habits unless you know the kids well. The genius of a school like Mission Hill starts with being small. People wonder ‘How are you going to run a high school with a high teacher-to-student ratio without changing the budget?’ It can be done if the school wants to. It's a matter of making tough decisions about what is more and less important. It can be done in the cities or in the suburbs, in rural areas, in public schools and private schools. If schools really believe that teachers can’t teach well children that they don’t know, they’ll find a way. When you visit those schools, their success is palpable.”
Another formula for a school’s success, according to Ted, is that it “has to be highly flexible at the teacher level. Jan’s kids may get it that day, may still get it the next day, but she might have to go over the lesson in two more days. Flexibility is the key, as well as an irreducible core curriculum. The teacher needs to have the time to deal with this group of kids one way and that group in another way. Schools I admire are very sloppy in the sense that they are in constant movement.”
Another Board member said: “When you talk about schools with rules or regulations modeling behavior, what are things for us to look for, to be sure we are modeling the right behaviors?”
Ted replied, “Charlie Merrill [Charles Merrill, founder of Commonwealth School and Headmaster until his retirement in 1981] had one rule: don’t roller skate in the hallways. His point was that all those issues about rules are subject to debate against this standard. Running a big boarding school as Nancy and I did, we realized that a handbook of dos and donts doesn’t work unless the kids get their heads around their convictions. Otherwise, it’s just a provocation for breaking rules.”
Nancy added, “Chinese history says you can tell when a dynasty is failing—the rules and regulations start to multiply as thickly as hairs on the neck of an ox. Which rules are only crowd control, and which of them have to do with something important for students to take onto another life? When people don’t have right spirit, that’s when they seem to need documentation about all the things to do and not to do.”
Board President Paul Parisi offered this comment: “Parents’ school experiences were often different from those of their children. When we were in school, the people who were successful were the ones who caught on quickly. Others had more difficulty, but that was just the way it was. As parents, we need to understand the program at a school that fosters learning at different levels. How can we help each other understand that?” And (referring in particular to the progressive style of education at schools such as Parker and Mission Hill) Paul wondered, “How do you get parents to buy into and trust the system?”
Ted replied, “At Parker, every kid is treated as a special needs student, and a learning partnership is worked out with the teacher, parent or guardian, so the issue is right up-front. The expectation is that kids will learn on the basis of their portfolios and in defense of their portfolios—and parents either agree to this or say ‘this is not the kind of school I want for my kids.’ Those of us raised and schooled a different way are instinctively nervous about something different. The way to deal with this is through the alliance of families and schools.”
Jan Maguire gave an example of how the school-parent partnership is nourished at Nashoba Brooks. “I think that, here, the performance of understanding is so useful. Parents come into the school to see students truly in action, not just on a set curriculum evening or visiting day. Just this morning, during a performance of understanding on a unit on Egypt, students were able to show all the steps, all the components of their work to their parents. Once the work is understandable, parents can connect to it.”
Neal Brown said, “At a lot of schools parents are on campus only for special events, a choral or dramatic performance. It’s important to create more opportunities for parents to come in and see—‘Oh, this is what the work led to after that third draft,’ or to understand that the skill a student learned in technology class was done as a Hyperstudio project in social studies.”
Ted had a further thought on parent understanding: “The way for parents to get insight is to get their help asked. At Parker, students have to prepare a major senior project for public exhibit, and an appeal goes out for parents with all kinds of expertise to come and spend time with the students, to be mentors, helpers. People like to be asked to help rather than just to ‘be told.’ ”
Concern about parental buying-in evoked this rhetorical question from a trustee: “Has there ever been a generation when parents didn’t resist change and glorify the past? It’s an innate part of parents and schools—parents are always going to object to education that’s not like their own.”
Standardized testing was the next issue on the table. Ted said, “MCAS [Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System] has exposed schools that have simply warehoused kids, and this is a good thing, but not if that becomes the coinage of education. Standardized testing cannot plumb the kind of depth and inculcate the habits that good schools should be about. Every good school has some kind of standardized testing, a picture, but you don’t stop there. The 1993 Education Act in Massachusetts did not set up MCAS. That Act said testing was to be done by “multiple means.” The State Board of Education has ignored that. At Parker, if you don’t pass the MCAS, you can still get a diploma. And the Parker Essential School is public charter school.”
In considering public schools in the U.S., a trustee ran some figures in his head and said, “There are 60 million kids in U.S. schools, k through twelve, and the country spends about six thousand per kid. We spend considerably more than that here, so can we expect public schools to be all that we’d like them to be for six thousand dollars? Can we get enough talent to staff all schools with the level of talent that’s now available only in some places?”
Ted answered, “We have been able to do that at Parker by not offering a lot of things. We believe in foreign language as long as it’s Spanish and everyone takes it. We don’t offer football or ice hockey. Yes, you can run a school at substantially less by saying, Let us do a few things exceedingly well, rather than many things superficially. We need to have public policies, money provided to public schools in certain ways, such as allowing parents the choice to pick schools and giving schools the right to deploy money in the way they see best and not spent by a plan seen from on high.”
Paul Parisi had a more general concern about public schools in America, an endangerment of, in his words, “one of the foundations of democracy approaching a freefall.”
Ted agreed that this was a valid concern. He said, “A lot of it has been carefully crafted—if you set out to humiliate public schools, many of which are first class, if you set out to create a drumfire of humiliation about how public schooling has failed, and then add in some conspiracy theories that it’s an enormous industry and if you privatize, a lot of people could make a lot of money—freefall. We need someone to realize that Horace Mann was right. Education is the great equalizer, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”
Nancy said, “Who would have dreamt when we started out that we could create public schools based on our experience with private schools? Whenever I feel discouraged, I like to think there are better ideas out there than when I was going to school, and some of them will be played out.”
Even in the midst of discussing current crises in education, the talk never veered far from teachers, from excellence in teaching. At one point a trustee commented: “At Nashoba Brooks we have amazing team teaching that coalesces around a core curriculum, and it seems magical to me that everybody is on the same page. What a teacher like Jan does is so difficult and demanding—how do we take care of adults who do that? Our school is populated with teachers who do this every day. How do we, as trustees, foster an environment to support that kind of teaching?”
Ted: “You hope that the principal is a good picker. Not everybody has same talents, and one person can do something another person can’t. Schools must build in time for faculty and staff to work together. There’s no issue about elite or non-elite when talents are shared.”
Kay Cowan said, “We had a powerful moment recently to illustrate just that. When Katrina Holmberg, one of our preschool teachers, left to start a family, the faculty and staff gathered to recognize her. Usually we give a gift, there are thank-yous, but Katrina got up and made an incredibly touching speech. She remembered when she came to Nashoba Brooks—she is a gifted teacher and she has wonderful credentials; Columbia Teacher’s College—she looked around stunned and humbled by the people she was working with. She’d go to [veteran preschool teacher] Merry Long and ask if she was going to measure up. In her words, we make it okay to take risks and okay to fail because someone will help you do it better than the last time. Her final words were, ‘This is a very difficult community to leave.’ ”
Ted: “What you described doesn’t happen by chance. You have to nurture that.”
Nancy: “It’s not all that common in private schools either, that collegiality among teachers, all on the same team. These are our kids, and we want them to have a seamless trip through all their classes, but that’s not always offered.”
Responding to another trustee’s concern about attracting young teachers in today’s financial climate, and about keeping those good teachers who are on board, Ted replied, “It’s important for there to be a sense in the teacher’s head that she’s growing, doing something different this year than last, working with new set of people, chairing a committee that the school values—a way for her to feel her extra measure of expertise will be of use to those around her. That’s the way to retain teachers.”
And returning to the importance of grappling, this time from the teacher’s perspective, Ted said: “Every teacher deserves the respect of substantial autonomy within an honest and supportive community. Teachers are not delivery machines programmed to provide certain things on the table in front of their students. I often say that we are in the humanity business. We're dealing with ideas and children's minds.”
Following the evening of discussion, Assistant Head of School Neal Brown had this reflection:
I found the conversation with Ted and Nancy inspiring. Their words of wisdom about how schools need to be places that respect what kids have to offer resonated with what we do here at Nashoba Brooks, as did their conviction that helping students to develop habits of mind is more important than simply asking them to swallow and parrot finite
pieces of information. I think of our school as a place where students truly grapple with ideas. It is also the kind of school described by Ted and Nancy as one where adults work together, where veteran teachers have opportunities to lead, and novices have master
teachers from whom to learn, and to emulate. Teachers want to work in places like Nashoba Brooks, and children are challenged and excited by the kinds of assignments that their teachers, often working in teams, develop for them. Nancy and Ted talked
about schools that are driven by principles. We stand for something here. Our ideas, as expressed in the school motto, about what it means to “play fair” or to “reach out,” permeate what we choose to teach, how we choose to teach it, and underscore the ways we, as adults, model the kind of behavior and “habits” we want from our students. As Ted has said, “Our schools should be described and represented by principles and ideas, and how those ideas and principles play out practically is for those of us close to our own youngsters to shape.”Ted and Nancy Sizer
Theodore R. Sizer was described by Teacher magazine in 1996 as "America's most famous educational reformer.” He is University Professor Emeritus at Brown University and was the first head of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. After beginning his career as an educator at Roxbury Latin, he became Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard and, subsequently, Headmaster of Phillips Academy. During his time at Brown, he founded the Coalition of Essential Schools, which is based on ideas articulated in his 1984 landmark book, Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School and its two sequels, Horace's School: Redesigning the American High School (1992) and Horace's Hope: What Works for the American High School (1997).After retiring from Brown, he and his wife, Nancy Faust Sizer, served as Acting Co-Principals at the newly formed Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Ayer.
Nancy Faust Sizer is a long-time educator whose work has graced both public and private high schools, including what was then Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Phillips Academy, and the Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, where she chaired the history department. With her husband, Ted, she has taught at Brown University, and she and Ted are currently on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While serving with Ted as Acting Co-Principals at the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Ayer, she was also the Transition Counselor, working with the school’s first graduating class as they approached post-secondary education. The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (Beacon Press, 1999) is her most recent publication, and a new book on the senior year of high school is forthcoming, both co-written with Ted Sizer.
