FieldAR2023OnlineAll11.13 - Magazine - Page 7
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Enhancing the Classroom and Student Experiences
Generous contributions from our community allow our curriculum to grow, classrooms to come to life, and
students to thrive in an immersive learning environment.
Workspaces Increase Collaboration and Functionality
$330,000 invested in new classroom furnishing
In the summer of 2022, Field faculty read Ron Ritchhart’s Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must
Master to Truly Transform Our Schools. Faculty members were tasked with reading a few specific chapters,
one of which was Chapter 9, “Environment: Using Space to Support Learning and Thinking.” Ritchhart lays out
the foundational idea of the chapter: “As a culture shaper, the physical environment is the ‘body language’ of
an organization, conveying its values and key messages…(it) will influence how individuals interact, their
behavior, and their performance. The physical space can inhibit or inspire the work of a group or individual.”
Middle School Instructional Coach Kathy Coen recalls when she first arrived at Field in 2019, “I remember
feeling uncertain about what the dated and clunky furniture was revealing about the pedagogy at Field. Would
this dated and varied furniture allow me to inspire student-centered, collaborative work in my courses? Was it
functional and inclusive of all students? The size of each student varies greatly from 6th grade to 12th grade.”
It is hard to inspire ”new learning in an old container.” In other words, Field’s vision of
student-centered, engaged, forward-looking pedagogy needed furniture that could help
support our necessary culture-shaping. As Head of School Lori Strauss commented, “We
needed to move into the future, which is now.” We needed furniture that would match
our vision of where we are and where we wanted to go as a “Culture of Thinking.” The
new furniture arrived for the opening of school in the 2022-23 school year.