The Country Day School’s Magazine Feeds a Growing Mind

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the Growing Mind magazine?
A: I started in this role as director of research and innovation at the Country Day School in the fall of 2009. Initially the focus of the work that I do was to ensure that educators have the best information they can have about student learning, guiding our own professional growth and making sure our programs are developing in the right ways for our kids. But as I was working on that, I realized the overlap between teaching and parenting is significant in some areas of kids’ lives. So we were talking as a school how it might be really helpful for parents to also know about some of the topics that we were learning about. And it turns out that they do. They’re quite interested in the topics. The types of things that end up in the Growing Mind are not so much about the nuts and bolts of curriculum development or daily class lessons but more about the broad foundations of learning and how we can learn more about how kids learn. Parents are just as interested about those topics I think as educators are, so it was a natural bridge between the two worlds. It comes out twice a year (fall and spring).

Q: What is your mission with Growing Mind?
A: As a school, we design our publication based on what we feel is right for our students and based on what we feel our parents would be most interested in. The title reflects our position that kids are always learning, always changing, always developing and that the mind itself is like a muscle under development and can always improve with use. So we really have a fundamental belief in this school that children are not fixed entities. It’s not the case that they  just are what they are and can only do a certain amount depending on what they’ve been born with. We have what some people call a growth mindset, where we believe that children can grow, change, improve and adapt and that their minds are plastic. So the title of the magazine reflects our realistic but also optimistic view that everyone has the potential to grow and so it really fits in with our philosophy as a school.

Q: Who came up with concept of magazine?
A: We did as a school and as a team were talking all the time about ways we could talk to the parents more and be more creative in how we could communicate so as a team this is an idea we came up with and I’m the one who is mostly executing it but it’s a collaborative effort from the school for sure.

Q: Who is your audience with this magazine?
A: The magazine goes to every family in school and every member of our school (teachers and staff). Primary readership are parents, or other teachers and educators, but it’s for sure been designed for our parents first and foremost. We really believe in having an open dialogue with parents about all the elements of learning that can affect their kids and the kids we have in our care. We always like to have ways to talk to the parents and communicate with them, and also take their ideas for anything they would like to see profiled in the magazine. So it’s really a way of having us inside the school but also between the school and the families sharing some ideas and having really productive conversations about how we can help kids learn.

When we first developed the magazine, our main audience was our own parent community: parents, grandparents, families and extended families; our teachers also read it although the topics are quite familiar to them. But it’s become clear that the reading community is a bit wider than we thought. So we know that teachers are reading it from other schools. I get calls and requests from individual teachers and also from entire schools just to talk a bit about the magazine or share the magazine. It’s printed and distributed to our own mailing lists and our own community of parents, guardian of kids and also our teachers. But then after the issue is distributed to our print community it’s available online. It’s there and it’s not behind a parent password because we feel that anybody who works with kids might be interested in the magazine and we’re happy to share it with anybody who is sharing our interests.

Q: How are teachers involved in the magazine?
A: The magazine comes out of my office rather than teachers themselves sitting and working on the articles. Really the teacher’s relationship with the magazine is through the ideas. All of us in the school are learning about and talking about the ideas that show up in the magazine. We do reading together, we do professional development together, we have lots of conversations of how what we’re learning about kids can affect what we do in the classroom so our professional development is partly reflected in the magazine.

Q: How are educators using the magazine?
A: I get some emails and questions and phone calls. I’m not sure exactly what uses they’re putting it to. I know it’s being read and it’s being talked about. I would doubt it’s being used inside their schools for professional development or anything that quite formal, but mostly we haven’t marketed the magazine so people are just sort of learning about it and asking questions about it. We get lots of positive feedback from other schools (teachers and administrators) about how it’s really been good for them just to read and think about and talk about as opposed to using it in any particularly formal way.

Q: What kind of work is involved in putting the magazine together?
A: I do the writing for the magazine although I take in all sorts of suggestions, responses, edits from the whole administrative team in the school so we as a group are always looking at the magazine in terms of what the content could be and what we’re working on inside the school and reflecting that outside the school. But in terms of the writing I do the writing. My primary role in the school is to be working in research at all times. So mostly I am committed to and spend my time accessing research and ideas about learning for our school and for our own education. This is an offshoot of the work that I do so it’s at the core of what I do. I really am the person at the school who has been handed over the task of making sure that our understanding about how kids learn is as up to date as it can be and staying connected with universities and university researchers and so on.  I do write it and publish it but of course it’s a collective and collaborative output in that our whole administrative team is involved in its creation.

Q: Did you get any compelling response from students or parents that stand out?
A: The parents are very excited and energized by it I think. It’s really been delightful. When I’m at parent events here at the school, invariably people will come up and make a comment about the article that they’ve enjoyed or just the overall idea of the magazine itself. I’ve only heard positive responses and I’m hoping that’s reflective of the community. The teachers enjoy reading it. It’s fairly familiar to the teachers because these are topics we work on anyway internally at the school. Mostly the parents just  seem to find it interesting, refreshing and a little bit different in terms of a school publication. It’s fairly atypical for a school to have a magazine like this and they just seem to be genuinely enjoying it.