Dear Families,
What a fabulous turn out at last night’s Back to School Pizza Picnic! It’s always a treat to have our community come together, parents meeting other parents, our students introducing their classmates to their families, and faculty seeing their students’ siblings and loved ones. We hope you enjoyed the beautiful weather and that you left with a belly full of pizza and ice cream!
Our next community event is on September 22nd–our annual Meet the Teachers Night. While this is an adults-only evening, this will offer an opportunity to spend time with other parents once again, to learn more granular details about your child’s classes, and to hear about our goals for the school year.
On that latter topic, a couple weeks ago, Adam Grant wrote a blog post about conscious competence. Typically, conscious competence is viewed as a stopping point along the way to the highest level of expertise and understanding (unconscious competence). But in Grant’s post, he really reveres conscious competence not as a stepping stone, but as a sweet spot where the greatest level of growth and mental flexibility can happen. He calls on readers to create opportunities to stay in that consciously competent zone in order to stay available to change and ultimate development.
Earlier this summer, the faculty watched Eduardo Briceno’s TED Talk about spending more time in the learning zone. Both the Grant post and this TED Talk get at the same idea–there are specific ways we can nurture the learning mind and we absolutely benefit from the intentional work of building that environment.
As we set off at the start of this new school year, I’m looking forward to leaning into these ideas fully, helping our students to keep their learning edge, and working with our team of faculty to create the right atmosphere to make it all possible.
More on all of this at Meet The Teachers Night! For now, enjoy the weekend. I’ll see you all back at the curb on Monday morning!
Warmly,
Alli
