Dear TCS Community,
The presentations from Tamara, Ginny, Susan, and Polly’s classes and the OSP at the MLK community meeting/assembly reaffirmed Touchstone’s commitment to helping students find their voices—in expected and surprising ways.
What we have come to expect from student presentations in our community meetings is fearlessness about standing and delivering, whether it’s a skit, a poem, an analysis, an argument, or something in between—and we heard that. What we also have seen from student performances this year is an integration of writing, speaking, and art that is much more than the sum of its parts—and we saw that again. And what we have absolutely come to expect from our students is their affinity for creating their own words (sometimes ad-libbed) to address an important community issue—and we witnessed that throughout the assembly.
But the surprising piece for many of us, even though we could see it coming, was how each of the classes managed to call forth the voice of the collective as well as the voices of individuals in such inter-related fashion.
The challenge of standing up for others and standing up for ourselves demands just those elements: fearlessness, integration, finding our own words, and connecting those thoughts to the words of others. We left the assembly with new evidence of the power of a Touchstone education, and with new footage for telling Touchstone’s story.
Family night saw another demonstration of the interdependence of individual and collective learning. We saw plenty of evidence of individual accomplishments in the form of solo pieces mounted for the art show and on display in each classroom. At the same time, there were stunning examples of group imagination and learning at work—in the transformation of classrooms into spaces for whole-class projects and the common room into a whole-school gallery. Robert Sternberg has talked about the need to add two pieces to the definition of intelligence: “practical intelligence†(including the ability to convince a group of your point of view) and “creative intelligence†(including the ability to respond positively to new circumstances). He hasn’t talked as much about the synergy between those two intelligences. With the MLK assembly and the family night/art show, we can see that those two intelligences draw strength from each other, just as individual TCS students contribute to the group’s learning even as they benefit from group support. Looking forward to more evidence of that interdependence at the OSP productions today!
Warmly,
Don Grace, Head of School