It’s been a BIG year at REAL! Read more in our Annual Report
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Empowering girls to use their voices has always been mission-critical for Girls Preparatory School (GPS), an independent day school for girls in grades 6-12 based in Chattanooga, TN.
We partnered with GPS to create a school-wide Conversation Culture that would activate voices throughout the entire community.
Read on to learn more!
Ellie Walsh-Moots is a Social Studies teacher, former department chair (and Jeopardy! Teachers Tournament quarterfinalist!) who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. She is passionate about studying middle leadership – that is, the experience of school leaders who maintain teaching responsibilities – within schools. A Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Grantee, Ellie spent part of 2022 researching…
“Teaching is demanding! These folks have to be attending to children’s mental health even as they are trying to teach them educational materials. To maintain community well-being, we need to look “upstream” at who’s running the ship, and in the classroom, that is the teacher. Everything’s affected if they’re doing well, or doing poorly. So you, as a teacher, are the upstream influence. Your wellbeing matters — of course your knowledge and skills do too, but to maximize them, we have to be sure you feel good as a human being.”
by Emily Gromoll, Director of Program We began this school year excited to launch R.E.A.L. Discussion Dashboards, our new action research tool, but we were not sure what to expect. We hoped for a few things: first, that we could learn more about which areas – namely, discussion skills, sense of belonging, growth mindset, etc….
Achieving the mission of Nativity Preparatory School — in which students grow in character, deepen their faith, and develop transferable academic skills — requires a foundational skill set: the ability to express oneself and listen deeply to others. We partnered with Nativity Prep to break discussion into teachable, assessable skills, starting in sixth grade. Read…
“When I considered my values or goals for discussion, I realized that my goal wasn’t to have kids speak more, but to encourage them to ask questions, to reference the text more often, to be unafraid to say they’ve rethought and want to follow up with a question.”
“There’s no way that we can guarantee that a discussion is equitable. What we can work toward is finding as many ways to get student voices into it as possible.”