By KAYLA J. MARSH
Staff Writer
TINTON FALLS – Ranney School officials are gearing up to head to California, where they will partake in a week-long training program that helps educators incorporate and implement design thinking skills into the classroom.
Eight Ranney School faculty members and academic leaders will head to the Nueva School Design Institute in San Mateo this summer to attend workshops on design thinking and bring back all they learned to help enable students not only to generate ideas, but design solutions to real-world problems.
“We’re focusing on changing the dynamics of classroom instruction,” said Patricia Marshall, the assistant head of School for Academics at Ranney.
“Ranney School is an excellent school and it always has been and always will be, but what we do very well, is that we have teachers who are experts in their fields and experts in content and our kids do extremely well in the classroom and achieve great things and … they’re great critical thinkers and the next step after being a critical thinker is actually creating from your ideas, so we’re adding and changing the instructional dynamics of the classroom to take it to the next step.”
Heading from Ranney to the Nueva School Design Institute are Middle School Division Head Matt Hall, Upper School English Teacher Leslie Patient, Middle School Art Teacher Madeleine McCarthy, Lower School Fourth Grade Teacher Jeri Robinson, Computer Science Teacher and Robotics Advisor Chiara Shah, Upper School Visual Arts Teacher Pam Shipley, Lower School Science Teacher Judy Salisbury and Middle School Science Teacher Lauri Rozzo.
“We look for teachers and administrators to come to Ranney School with networks and experiences that they can bring … and so we learned about the Nuevea Institute from one of our new administrators and she had colleagues who went there and had a network that allowed us to research it and find that it was right for us for our next step,” Marshall said.
“So we decided we would take [Science Department Chair Tom Allen, Upper School Division Head Katie Gibson, Lower School Division Head Andrea Danial] and myself last year to figure out what is it that we need to learn, how to begin supporting faculty and does this process have relevancy for Ranney School where we are today and where we’re going with our strategic planning.”
Marshall said the week-long program is about helping the school, faculty, staff, students and curriculum grow and creating a culture that is centered on design thinking, creative thinking and designing models.
“The Nuevea Institute was a natural progression for us to go and to learn about the kinds of questions that we should be asking in the classroom and learn what we should be asking of our students, helping them to take the information we teach and walk them through the design process to actually create concepts from what they are learning from our teachers,” she said.
“This year we are focusing on sending eight teachers out to the Nuevea Institute to continue the learning process and we’re very excited about it because things are different for [students] now.
“They leave school and they go to college and they are not passive recipients of information anymore. They are expected to create and to design and to contribute to this world and we know that we need to back the process up and begin developing that structure in our classrooms.”
The Nueva School Design Institute’s program allows participants to bring the training they receive into their classrooms and provide students with skills and methods that also complement and evolve curriculum into a balance of education and hands-on practice.
Ranney School has already started implementing some of the skills officials have learned through the school’s growing Innovation Labs and makerspaces, and students are getting more opportunities to put their design thinking skills into action, such as through studying electricity, using 3-D printers to program and generate sculptures, using simple plywood and tools to build canoes and broadcasting platforms from scratch and even using traditional arts and crafts materials, to design and construct classroom furniture.
“That is why the Nuevea Institute is so important to us, because excellence in education … is about helping [students] construct learning in real life,” Marshall said. “Everything they learn, whether it is history, English, mathematics, science, they should be able to take in all that information and understand the purpose and the context of what they’re learning and how that information helps them design an idea that will make this world a better place and once you have that idea, how do you take it a step further and actually construct it?
“You have to go through an articulation process or an iteration process in order to validate excellent learning and that is what Nuevea Institute really teaches and why we think it is so important for our faculty to be trained there.”
