This Thursday, December 11th, we will be hosting our first Gallery Night. Tad Phippen Wente has already provided an overview of the evening. We are looking forward to an insightful evening with an in-depth look into our students’ thinking and the work they do at school.

This evening is our first of what we hope to be two or three Gallery Nights this year, featuring student work with an emphasis on their thinking and process. We are keeping our Gallery Night on December 11th small and only inviting parents and members of our immediate community, however, if you know if people outside of our school community who might be interested in this, please bring them along. In the future, we hope to open these Gallery Nights to the public as another way to showcase the work of our students.

As you prepare for our Gallery Night, it is important to understand what we are looking to create. Gallery Night is an extension of our Culture of Thinking work and an important part of our instructional program. Our Culture of Thinking work is based off of the Culture of Thinking work at Harvard University’s Project Zero. For our schools, this is an explicit way to teach higher order thinking in the classroom. It starts with our Habits of Mind which consist of Observing, Wondering, Connecting, Reasoning/Interpreting, and Innovating. These habits provide the goals we have for student thinking.

To explore content using these habits, our teachers and students have created classroom environments where students honor each other’s thinking and support it. We call it our Intellectual Community. We support each other’s thinking through dialogue, building off of each other’s ideas, and making thinking visible. Students keep notebooks documenting their thinking and teachers document student thinking in the classroom through a variety of methods. Our thinking routines are visible throughout the school.

It is this the products of this Culture of Thinking that you will see at our Gallery Night. Students will be docents in the galeries, sharing the thinking and process they went through. We are very excited to share this with you.