Welcome to Brooks and CBE!

Aug 21 2024

Hello from Dean of Teaching and Learning Joanna McDonough, with Dean of Faculty Tim Benson, the first contributors to Brooks School's Deans' Den Blog for the 2024 - 2025 school year.

We are thrilled to welcome our new faculty to campus this week as we begin to get the 2024-2025 school year started! This week began with a two-day, competency-based education (CBE) workshop.

Three returning teachers and two new teachers joined me to learn about CBE at Brooks School and build assessments and rubrics in a collaborative and reflective workshop experience.

We choose one school-wide competency each year to be our curricular focus across academic departments. The all-school, Manage One’s Learning (MOL) skill, under the Learning Agency competency introduced last year, includes elements of meaningful engagement, preparation for class and self-advocacy and communication. This MOL skill is reported for each class at each marking period and in most cases counts for up to 10 percent of a student's grade. Students are able to understand and reflect upon how they are learning throughout their courses.

For the 2024-2025 school year, teachers across all academic departments will be focusing on further defining and building assessments that support the Social Justice Responsibility (SJR) competency. Each department will determine specific skills that support SJR and work to incorporate those skills into student assessments. Focus groups, for students and for faculty, will guide this work throughout the year.

The rest of our new faculty get started on Wednesday and Thursday this week with new faculty orientation before our full faculty reconvenes from August 27 through August 29 to prepare to welcome students on campus and start our academic year. It’s almost time!

Welcome to the 2024-2025 school year!

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Welcome to Brooks and CBE!