Although school is over for my students, it isn’t over for me. I am doing what I have come to affectionately term “New Teacher Boot Camp.” Its official title is “Collegiate School Teaching Institute” and is a two week program (weekends included!) which focuses on skills for new teachers, as well as getting new teachers acclimated with aspects of teaching particular to independent schools (such as comment writing, for example).

Before attending the boot camp, each of the participants was asked to read and review Theodore R. Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer’s book The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract. My review — surely still with typos and needing a good proofreading — is below the fold, for anyone who is interested. The one thing I didn’t put in the review, but which I couldn’t help but notice as I was reading this book, was how well my school conforms to the Sizers’ view of a good school. The thoughtful and reflective community (we often — sometimes to my chagrin because we do it too much or badly — talk about the core values of the school and how we can enact them), the attention to making each student feel like they are part of the community and respected, the emphasis on community norms and collective decision making (such as having a student-faculty judiciary committee or inviting students to be on hiring committees), the knowledge that each student has an individual learning style (the learning specialists are central to the running of the school and not a peripheral department; we write narrative comments on each student twice a year), and so on and so forth. No one would claim that it is a perfect school. But at least in terms of how the Sizer’s see things, I think they wouldn’t bite their thumbs at us.

Again, review after the jump. My opinion of the book below is very likely (read: almost certainly) going to change after I get to discuss this with the other participants in the program.

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