@edcampIS is a traveling edcamp which follows the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) annual conference. This year’s location was sunny Baltimore, Maryland, and my fellow organizer, Shannon Montague (@MontySays), hosted #edcampIS at her wonderful school, The Bryn Mawr School. It was awesome to visit such a special learning environment which was apparently founded to be a feeder school for my alma mater, Bryn Mawr College. Thank you, for the history lesson, Shannon! Many thanks to the Edcamp Foundation for providing an Edcamp-in-a-Box which includes $200 towards the event. Due to Shannon’s uncanny knack for ordering from @PaneraBread, we had a magnificent spread for all of us that was within 47 cents of our total budget!
It was an intimate group that gathered in the Upper School Library this morning (“small and mighty” as tweeted by Jonathan E. Martin). Besides Shannon and me, our group consisted of Chris Shriver, Peter Gow, Jonathan Martin, Tammy Rice, Jen Cort, Amanda Macomber, Kristen Kennedy, Molly Smith, and Alex Northrup. As per any edcamp or unconference conversation, I always say that any and all who show up are the right people. We remained in a circle for much of the morning, enjoying a robust conversation which included: Sharing key takeaways from NAIS, thinking about school design, fostering a culture of innovation, educating students to be awesome grown-ups, getting out of our bubbles, embracing vulnerability, and sustaining social justice initiatives throughout the curriculum. Later in the morning, we divided into two groups for either a tour of Bryn Mawr School’s wonderfully impressive innovation spaces given by the incomparable Kristen Kennedy or a little more conversation and carbs in the library.
Here is a link to our GoogleDoc of shared notes that are also embedded below:
Below are some photos from the Upper School and Middle School spaces. Check out all the Harkness Tables that are all over the high school and also in 8th grade classrooms. I posted images of the Innovation Lab where Kristen Kennedy works her magic in a separate post….
Karen Blumberg 