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Behind the Scenes: 21st-Century Girls Meet 21st-Century Challenges
On #GirlTalk blog, Dr. Ralph Covino discusses how his association with National Geographic impacts his students.
One thing that folks might not know about GPS is that we teachers are involved in a near-continuous cycle of professional development activities. Perhaps you saw the photos of January’s in-service across our social media accounts. We read up on the latest education trends, follow dozens of bloggers and Twitterati, attend professional workshops, and share our knowledge and experience with others across a variety of media. I’d like to use this #girltalk blog post to give you just one example of the sort of thing we do behind the scenes so as to enrich our girls’ experiences both inside the classroom and out.
Last fall, nearly 100 other educators across the world and I took part in the Beta test of an exciting new initiative, National Geographic’s Educator Certification program. As a professional development aficionado, I was probably a bit too excited about the prospect of working with such a recognizable brand. After all, who didn’t really have their curiosity about the wider world sparked by National Geographic when they were kids? The familiar yellow-bordered publication transported me, as I’m certain it did many of you, to faraway lands and, through its glossy pages, offered glimpses of peoples whose lives were (and still are) so markedly different from our own. Never, it must be said, as a child did I envision that I would travel the world or live in half a dozen countries before I turned 30; that wasn’t something people I grew up near or with did. I had National Geographic; that was enough. Little did I know…
What really sold me on signing on for the beta test, beyond the connection to National Geographic, was the hook that they used to bait teachers like me; it went as follows: “Do you believe in empowering students to think like explorers? In building geographic competency across disciplines? In inspiring students to be global thinkers who can change the world? If so, you’re in good company here.” If you had asked me beforehand to describe what goes on across the curriculum at GPS, I am not certain that I could have come up with a better description of what we try to do here day in and day out—although, of course, I would have swapped in ‘girls’ for ‘students’ for obvious reasons. (After three and a half years at GPS, I confess to the fact that the line between ‘students’ and ‘girls’ has blurred a touch for me, and I have more than once caught myself referring to ‘my girls’ even when talking about my former university students, most of whom were [are] male…)
In addition to participating in the obligatory workshop, over the three months of the program, the other beta testers and I deployed sample National Geographic-created course content in our own classrooms and sought feedback from our students. I have to say that our girls did us all proud in this respect. It is said that the first step in solving a problem is the recognition that a problem exists in the first place and, gosh, did they pinpoint the issues with the sample lessons. Our girls had no qualms about sharing thoughts as to how to improve, but they did so with heart and were never cruel; I was blown away by their grace, honesty, and sincere effort. Critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and effective communication are at the top of the 21st century skill-set list, after all, and I do so love it when they get it right, right from the start. I was more than pleased to brag about our girls (particularly my freshmen) and their ability to analyze during the multimedia capstone reflection, which I submitted to National Geographic in December.
Each day I step on the GPS campus, I am humbled by the knowledge that it is my solemn charge to challenge each girl anew to be her best self by providing learning opportunities that cultivate her skills in deep reading, critical thinking, and self-expression as well as her content knowledge. These have always been the skills necessary for success and the hallmark of a superlative preparatory school experience. New challenges, though, await the girls I teach today. They inhabit a world in some ways vastly bigger than that in which I grew up, at least in terms of opportunities for research, travel, and experience, but also one which is at times infinitely smaller and more isolating. While they will know fewer people who have never left their city, state, or country—perhaps none at all!—there will be relatively few points in their lives when they will not be able to instantly contact anyone they have ever met or, indeed, a world of perfect strangers through the mixed blessing that is social media. Oh, and they have the sum total of all of humanity’s knowledge available to them at the touch of a button; what wonders this modern world hath wrought, to borrow a phrase from Numbers.
I am truly thankful that I had the chance to participate in the National Geographic Educator Certification program, not merely because it adds another certificate to my burgeoning collection, but because, as a professional development opportunity, it has helped me think of new and, more to the point, better ways to curate the classroom experiences of my 21st century GPS girls so as to better prepare them for the magnificent and oft-uncertain world that awaits them beyond our halls.
(Also, parenthetically as a teaser: the study of Latin is more relevant now than at any point in the last 50 years, and its gifts continue to “delight youth” and “nourish old age” as in the time of Cicero who wrote those words [“haec studia adulescentiam acuunt, senectutem oblectant“] over 2,000 years ago; however, such is another topic for an entirely different #girltalk blog post.)
ABOUT DR. COVINO
Dr. Ralph Covino is now a fully fledged National Geographic Certified Educator. At GPS, he serves as the lead teacher for Latin language, for world history in the Upper School, and as Dean of the Junior Class.
