Pathway: Learning and Wellbeing
AISC creates an integrated student wellbeing program that promotes and fosters healthy habits, self-awareness, self-management and positive relationships.
After completing a high altitude program audit, the Wellbeing Council is hard at work designing questions that can be used in a self-assessment tool at the elementary, middle and high school levels alongside an additional tool for faculty. Working closely with the technology department, the team decided to move away from a traditional survey and, instead, hopes to create an application wherein users can get immediate feedback on the four domains of the Wellbeing Framework within the application itself. This allows users to remain anonymous unless they choose to share their email address to download a copy of their self-assessment results.
The team is working on devising age-appropriate questions that will ultimately offer feedback aligned with what is taught in health, PE and counseling curricula. The final tool will be vetted by health professionals, faculty teaching the related curriculum and the senior leadership team before prototyping the application in the late spring.
Research and Development
This year the Futures Plan includes a new pathway and a new faculty council: Research and Development. As part of our school commitment to innovation, our new faculty council, under the leadership of middle school math teacher Jayme Gawrych, has begun to shape our process for teacher-driven innovation and tackle some big questions we face: what can we use from our experience in virtual and hybrid to augment and improve our culture of teaching and learning moving forward?
Our first task has been to craft a “playbook” of innovation strategies and exercises that our faculty project leaders can use to ensure high quality and durable results for their projects. And second, we have re-launched the iLabs project, which calls for faculty around the campus and from within the R&D council to form ad hoc teams of teacher-researchers around projects that support our mission but that have uncertain outcomes.
Ultimately, we want to embed a culture of design, iteration, and collaboration into the ethos of the faculty, and where it is already embedded, to make it more visible and impactful. Look for more second semester when we launch the projects and publish the outcomes!
