<b>Pursuing Leadership Opportunities Through Continuing Education</b>
Students, faculty, and administrators alike were happy to welcome back Gwyneth Connell to Millbrook's history department this school year. After teaching at Millbrook for five years, she took a hiatus in 2006 to complete an intensive year-long program at Columbia University's Klingenstein Center to earn her MA in Education Leadership. Gwyneth, too, was excited to return with a new and broader understanding of the organization of independent schools and the associated challenges including leadership, legal issues, school finance, and marketing. The bigger picture aside, she is happy to be back in the classroom teaching to curiosity and facilitating students' participation as equal partners in the classroom.
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After attending the Klingenstein's two-week Summer Institute for Early Career Teachers in 2004, Gwyneth began thinking of teaching less as a passage to something else and more as a life career. It was a crash course on currricular diversity and looked at the goals of schools as organizations, exploring a whole other side of education.
Upon returning to Millbrook in the fall of 2004, Gwyneth worked with our Dean of Faculty, Kathy Havard, to institute a new Peer Mentoring program at Millbrook. Every year, each new teacher is paired up with a returning faculty member who can provide assistance as needed, focusing on school and teaching procedures rather than content areas. It's been an extremely successful program and continues today. Gwyneth is currently a peer mentor to Ricky Reichenbach, a 2001 graduate of Millbrook who returned this year to teach history. In fact, a video is being produced in celebration of the Klingenstein Center's 30th anniversary, and Gwyneth, Ricky, and the peer mentoring program are a highlighted segment!
Gwyneth is finding her recent studies useful not only in understanding the organization of independent schools, but also applications within the classroom. While having started off with a very traditional teaching model, she sees her teaching style evolving into a more student-centered philosophy of inquiry-based learning, particularly in her Human Rights class, a senior elective this year. She believes the course is empowering for students, allowing for much self-reflection and self-motivation, as she continually asks them to think about their role, their authority, and their responsibilities in the human rights arena. Indeed, students have demonstrated initiative and taken action - including organizing a STAND (Student Anti-Genocide Coalition) letter-writing campaign and Darfur Awareness Week events, plus contacting and inviting guest speaker, Dut Leek Deng, one of the lost boys of Sudan featured in the documentary God Grew Tired of Us. We are looking forward to his chapel talk which will be held on Thursday, February 14th.
Soon, another member of the history department, Mr. John Siegenthaler, will be completing the Klingenstein Center program to earn an MA in Education Leadership. He chose to enter the Summer program which includes intensive 6-week sessions for two consecutive summers plus special projects completed throughout the school year. In good company, both Gwyneth and John followed Dean of Students Kevin Soja who graduated from the Klingenstein Center with his master's degree in 2004.
