Grace to Host ResearchEd

The following is a letter from Head of School Robbie Pennoyer

My favorite educational conference is also the cheapest.  A hazard of being a head of school is an expectation that, every year, you’ll attend an alphabet soup’s worth of conferences.  There is value to attending these acronymed affairs, but there is also a hefty cost—particularly in terms of the time they require you to spend away from school.

 
I attended my first ResearchEd conference in 2018, and I’ve tried to go every year since.  The logistics make it easy:  tickets are ten times cheaper than comparable affairs, and the conferences take place over weekends, so teachers don’t have to miss class.  But what makes these conferences worthwhile is not the ease of attending them but the content covered once you’re there.  ResearchEd is a grassroots, teacher-led organization that seeks to bridge the gap between educational research and classroom practice, helping provide teachers with an evidence base that can inform how they help students learn.  In other words, ResearchEd equips teachers with practical information about what is likely to work in their classrooms and why.

That shouldn’t be radical.  It is.

Great teachers make hundreds of decisions about how to teach every day.  You want to check whether students understand the valuable point a classmate just made, so you ask a follow-up question.  Hands shoot up.  Do you call on one of them?  If you wait a bit longer, will a few of the kids who seem stumped benefit from the extra beat or two you’ve given them to think the matter through?  If you call on someone with a raised hand, do you risk signaling that folks are off the hook as long as they keep their hands down?  You decide to ask students to write down their answers, and you circulate, checking out their responses.  Whom do you call on to share their work?  Someone with a great answer?  Someone with a nearly right one that the class can then workshop together?  Someone picked at random?  

Teachers draw on their expertise and training to answer these sorts of questions and the stream of others that bubble up throughout every lesson.  ResearchEd came about in part because teachers grew frustrated with two problems:  (1) they had been trained to use frameworks for instruction that had no evidence of being effective, and (2) they had not been trained in frameworks that had mountains of evidence to support them.

Ask folks what they know about the science of learning, and if you listen long enough you’re bound to encounter some familiar neuromyths:  that we likely lean “right brained” or “left brained,” for example, or that we have preferred learning styles (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and that we learn better when the instruction we receive matches those preferences.  There is virtually no evidence to support these theories and plenty of data to conclude they are wrong.  Believe in these frameworks as a teacher, and they may shape the decisions you make in class in ways that do not serve your students well. 

Time is the most precious resource we have in schools, and great teachers are obsessed with how they use every minute they have with students.  With so many decisions to make about how to direct student time and attention, how much wiser it is to forgo neuromyths and to base decisions about class time instead on frameworks for learning that are grounded in the science of how we actually learn.  

This is not new for us at Grace, for the school has long been interested in ways that research and evidence can inform our practices.  That’s why we’ve never fallen for reading programs that undervalue phonics.  It’s why our high school schedule was designed with adolescent sleep needs in mind.  Our pedagogy of joy is not only grounded in our values as a school that wants students to work hard and, crucially, to like who they are when they’re doing so; it’s also consistent with our understanding of neuroscience and how emotions help encode memories.  But we can always improve, and one way we’ve sought to do so recently is by grappling with the work of engaging speakers and authors (e.g., Dan Willingham, Andrew Watson, Kenji Yoshino, Natalie Wexler) who have helped us translate evidence into practice.  

When I attended my first ResearchEd conferences, I was amazed that they weren’t full.  But word has gotten out, and at long last we’ve seen an explosion of interest in ways schools can harness the power of the science of learning.  Much of that boom has been fueled by the work done by folks I first encountered at ResearchEd conferences.

I’m delighted to announce that the next ResearchEd conference will take place at Grace Church School on Saturday, March 29.  What a privilege it will be to host educators from around the country and experts from around the globe.  A draft roster of speakers is in the works, and I’m giddy at the program that is coming together—giddy, too, at the thought of them walking away with a sense of the good work my colleagues and our students are doing at Grace.  If you’re in town that day (the last Saturday of our Spring Break), there will be opportunities to volunteer for the conference, and if you're a teacher (at Grace or elsewhere), I hope you'll consider attending.  The ticket price will be cheap (and free for Grace volunteers!), but the value will be great.
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Grace Church School is a co-educational independent school in downtown Manhattan, New York City providing instruction for nearly 800 students in Junior Kindergarten through Grade 12.