Relevance and Purpose in Teaching

Indian Mountain School will return to in-person classes this fall, while still offering a remote track of learning. This summer, our faculty have been engaged in a unique professional development opportunity to better adapt to the unique needs of each student this year. One Schoolhouse is an educational organization for both students and career educators that provides programming for teachers working in a variety of educational modes. Specifically, our faculty enrolled in their Designing, Building, and Teaching for Hybrid Learning course, as we have prepared to reimagine our program for the 2020-2021 school year.

This fall, our academic program will be a hybrid one, offering in-person and remote tracks to our students in Pre-K to grade 9. This past spring, we identified that to succeed in the months to come, we needed to empower our faculty with the additional tools and skills necessary to thrive within a hybrid-learning environment. The benefit of this program has gone beyond that original goal, as Dean of Faculty, Alex Hodosy, noted. “What we learned is that a lot of the development provided by the course, both high-level and specific, directly supports our school’s academic philosophy regardless of circumstance. In fact, nearly all of our school’s already-identified programmatic goals relating to cognitive diversity; differentiated learning; equity and inclusion; assessment techniques; and relevance and purpose in teaching are elevated when considered in the context of a hybrid learning model.”