To: Michael Green
From: Phillip Pearson
Date: June 20, 2022
RE: WHS Report
Looking Towards Next Year
On behalf of the WHS team, I want to thank the board for the opportunity to visit with you duringthe last board workshop. It was a great experience and it helped us to clarify our own thinking.By way of a board report, I’ve reproduced one of the slides from that presentation here:
We spent a lot of time on Thursday talking about the orange circles. Those are the ones that areinvolved in dual credit options like College in the High School. We didn’t spend much time onthe inner green circle labeled “Core Skills and Habits of Mind”, so I wanted to spend a fewsentences here clarifying what that circle refers to.
There exists a set of skills and dispositions that are useful and important in any walk of life,things like work ethic or timeliness or the ability to read for meaning or use evidence-basedreasoning. Although those programs that focus on more specialized skills like Cascadia orRunning Start implicitly rely on and build upon those skills for students, the building of thoseskills is not within their core mission. That’s our job.
Identifying those core skills is one of the tasks at WHS for next year, starting with the identificationof our core intellectual/academic habits of mind. The idea is that, as departments, we will bydefining intellectual habits of mind that are fundamental to all disciplines, and then make thosethings explicit in our courses. That work will be kicking off on the morning of August 24th andyou are all invited to join us to see how we get started.