Hello from the Ipswich, Massachusetts Public Schools Office of Teaching and Learning!

I'm happy to share this blog with you as a place to learn more about Teaching and Learning in IPS. As the year continues, I’ll post updates for the Ipswich community as to both my work in IPS and the Teaching and Learning work to come.

Just what does a "Director of Teaching and Learning" do, you ask? In a broad sense, this role is all about supporting and aligning 21st Century teaching and learning in our district. In my six months here, I have worked to support amazing IPS teachers -- both in their teacher leader roles and in their classrooms -- to collaborate together in curriculum writing, problem solving and teaching. IPS isn’t a place where teachers are simply handed textbooks or pre-written curriculum and expected to follow along. It’s a place where teachers are supported in writing the curriculum that students need and deserve to be the thoughtful, hard-working, outside-the-box thinkers that this world demands.

This school year's focus is on the Successful Habit of Mind (or "Habit") "critical thinking," so much of my work so far has been to bring resources for teaching critical thinking to IPS. Through this, I've worked with teachers and the district's Leadership Team to begin to put systems in place for teachers to write rigorous curriculum to ensure learning that will last a lifetime.

Why teach critical thinking?

Students’ ability to master and learn from curriculum’s objectives depends, of course, upon these students’ ability to think. However, are our students doing more than just “entry-level” thinking? Are they memorizing, or are they synthesizing? Restating or predicting? In short, do the problem-solvers of tomorrow need to be able to recognize and label a problem, or do we need them to be able to hypothesize and analyze it?

This school year, the entire district is using the same core resource to align teaching and learning around critical thinking. It’s called Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding and Independence for All Learners by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church and Karin Morrison.

This text is about how critical thinking is necessitated on students being able to practice metacognition -- that is, the practice of “thinking about thinking.” In Making Thinking Visible, the authors give concrete examples and practices called “thinking routines” for teachers to use in the classroom for students to practice thinking about their thinking. Children do this when you, say, ask them to explain how they arrived at a particular solution to a word problem or, as another example, when they read a book and stop to jot notes about connections they are making to the text.

Through critical thinking we reason

abstractly,

concretely,

quantitatively

and resourcefully

for a purpose.

These “thinking routines” are being used throughout Ipswich Public Schools, supporting students in the kinds of critical thinking they’ll need in this 21st Century world. Together with our Compass team members (teachers who facilitate and encourage continued curriculum design), Professional Learning Community -- or “PLC” -- team leaders (teachers who facilitate teams of colleagues as communities of learners), STEAM Team members (teachers working on an integrated approach to the teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) and more, Ipswich Public Schools is a place where students think critically and for a purpose. It is a district where students are being prepared to make a difference in the world.