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FACETIME
Throughout the 1990s, there was a
formula that tuition at schools like
SPS was the same as a mid-size car.
Today a mid-size car is $30,000 and
the annual tuition at St. Paul
’
s is nearly
double. Assuming there is a three per-
cent annual increase, tuition at SPS will
be more than $100,000 in 20 years. When
you look at that, what is it about a St. Paul
’
s
education that is going to make parents
excited about sending their children to
our school?
Until 15 or 20 years ago, we had a
lock on knowledge.
If you wanted to be
well educated, you had to go to SPS or a
school like it to get into the best colleges.
With the Internet now, 80 percent of the
world has access to its vast information
And in the U.S. it is virtually 100 percent.
If we no longer have that lock on knowl-
edge, what is it that makes a school like
St. Paul
’
s an attractive alternative?
A large number of people who cele-
brated college reunions this year have
jobs that didn’t exist when they were
in college.
Why would we prepare our
students for today
’
s world by teaching
them the same things we were taught
years ago? In the last 15 years, huge
strides have been made in understand-
ing how the human brain functions and
learns. It makes no sense that we teach
in old ways when there is mounting
evidence that engaging students in their
own learning is the best method.
When I started teaching, we were told
what to teach, handed a textbook,
and told to get to a certain page by
Thanksgiving break.
We were told to
be rigorous, to challenge the students, to
entertain them, but didn
’
t receive much
more in the way of instruction of
how
to
teach. We never really considered
why
we were doing this. We are now trying to
shift the paradigm and start with the why
in every course at St. Paul
’
s. Why are we
doing this? Is this essential knowledge
students will need going forward?
Determining what is that essential
knowledge is like nailing Jell-O to
the wall
because the answers today and
tomorrow will not be the same due to
the ever-changing world. Hence, there
is a shift in education to be more skills-
oriented. We must teach students to be
nimble, flexible, adaptive, and creative in
solving issues they have never before seen.
St. Paul’s is a very good school, but if
we don’t pay attention to changing
factors in education, we may become
irrelevant.
We have to strive to be great
and know what that means. Opening the
Center for Innovative Teaching is a start.
Making resources available for our
busy faculty to stay abreast of the
changes in the world of education is
an important mission.
Engineering – and our Engineering
Honors program – is a great vehicle
to describe the way we are thinking
about education as a whole.
In
planning for the future in education,
progressive educators are looking at
thinking as backwards by design. It’s
the way engineers have always thought
– you can’t build a bridge without
understanding of stress loads, geology,
and weather factors. You have to start
with the end product and work back-
wards. Increasingly in our other disci-
plines, we are applying the same way
of thinking, starting with, “What is it
our students have to know?”
With the Center for Innovative Teach-
ing, we are bringing professional
development in-house.
We are creat-
ing a faculty development curriculum
through which teachers will take a
term-long faculty seminar. The seminar
will include issues such as adolescent
development, recent ideas in learning,
cognitive science, neuroscience, and
areas outside of the classroom.
For those who might get worried that
St. Paul’s will lose its essence of being
St Paul’s as we look to the future, the
answer is a resounding “No!”
As we
work to integrate and develop these
and other areas in the future with 21st-
century skills and understandings, the
School will continue to carry the essence
of SPS well into the next century as one
of the leading independent secondary
schools in the world.
Exploring Innovative
Teaching
with
Lawrence Smith
“EDUCATION MEANS TEACHING PEOPLE HOW TO THINK, HOW TO LEARN, AND HOW TO
BEHAVE ALONE. THE BEST TEACHER EVER SEEKS TO MAKE HIMSELF DISPENSABLE.”
–
FOURTH RECTOR SAMUEL S. DRURY
SPS Dean of Curriculum and
Teaching Lawrence Smith sat
down with
Alumni Horae
to talk
about the future of education,
redefining essential knowledge,
and how the School is approach-
ing teaching and learning in the
21st century.
PERRY SMITH
