While the faculty as a whole considered some of the larger forces shaping education today, each academic department began an internal review called a Departmental Self-Study, a process in which each department could follow its own path to address its particular issues. This work has included reviewing course offerings and current research in their discipline; visiting each other's classes; inviting outsiders to review their work; and visiting similar classes at other schools.
However, departments also devised their own barometers for judging issues that are unique to their particular area of study. The modern languages department, for example, gave every student in every language at every level a common writing assignment (students wrote about the same picture) to help teachers determine a student's ability and to compare that ability with the learning goals for that student's particular level, as well as to provide raw material for evaluating grade assessment. The history department administered surveys and focus groups, and also asked their students to keep learning journals on the topics, assignments and pedagogy they encountered in their history classes.
"Education can take place only when a school takes into account the whole life of the student.". |
At the same time, seven study groups, comprising three to five faculty members and sometimes students, were formed (see sidebar, page 26). "As our colleagues were talking and writing to the committee that designed the review process, we found that many extra-departmental, whole-school issues kept emerging," Wolff relates. "We realized that it would be important to address those issues, and, if we were going to do that well, that we would need groups of interested colleagues to do serious research, identifying questions and findings to bring to the full faculty for its consideration."
After a year of reading the latest works on their subjects, interviewing experts and making site visits, this past fall the study groups have been bringing their findings back to the entire faculty.
The "Learning About Learning" study group, chaired by Sarah Ream '75, acting chair of the drama department, considered the physiology of how people-particularly teenagers-best learn. "We looked at different learning environments, and how what we do fits with the current research," Ream says. "Learning happens not because you transfer information from one who knows to one who doesn't; learning is all about student engagement. Learning only happens when there's energy and activity engaging the learner who's making sense of it for him- or herself. We found out that the Harkness table is a fine way to provide kids with a way to be very active in the learning process."
The move towards more and more technology in my teaching has been steady and relentless, and I have been a strong advocate at each step along the way . [But] consider what we have given up when we adopt a new technology. I do not believe the answers are trivial: Sometimes, it seems to me, that my students are lost in a sea of stuff. One colleague put it well when he complained that we are giving students a jack knife with 100 different specialty blades on it, and we are trying to teach them how to cut.
-Physics instructor and Curriculum Review Committee
member Brad Robinson
Other important factors, the group discovered, include exercise and sleep. "What helps learning is the opportunity for reflection," Ream declares. "And people have underestimated the role that sleep plays in learning. In deep sleep you are consolidating what you learn. Physical exercise is also conducive to learning; the more you feed the brain with a steady blood supply, the more enriched it is and the better it performs.
"A positive learning environment tends not only to promote learning but learning retention," she continues. "Two of the best lubricants for memory retention are dopamine and serotonin, the body's feel-good chemicals, which are released in positive learning states. Basically, researchers are finding evidence for what teachers have always known to be true anecdotally."
To better understand students' experience of the curriculum, the "Curriculum Mapping" group established a process for studying schoolwide, week-to-week patterns in student workload. And to give teachers firsthand knowledge of the demands-not only academic, athletic and extracurricular, but also social, logistical and physical-that Exeter students face on a daily basis, the group developed a program in which teachers will spend a day during the 2002-03 school year shadowing an advisee.
Physics instructor A.J. Cosgrove's experience found him trailing Tony Maruca not only to classes and sports, but also to a late-morning study session in Maruca's dorm room at Ewald Hall North, where Cosgrove is dorm head. Over the course of an hour, Maruca, an upper from Washington, D.C., churned through his math homework, due later that day, and made a good dent in his physics assignment as well.
What struck Cosgrove about this morning, he says, is that it is during these chunks of free time that students actually get their work done. "The reality is that in the evening, kids are tired. Students who are able to use chunks of time efficiently during the day are going to be successful at Exeter."
