At Innovation Sprint, Durham Academy Educators Find Time, Space to Dream Big
By Dylan Howlett
1,579 words | 6-minute read
Amid the lesson plans and report card comments, between grading and emailing and serving their students, Durham Academy educators have dreams. Ideas. Innovations. Yet they face the same predicament that besets instructional staff across education. Rarely do they have the time to launch those innovations, or explore their ideas, or achieve their classroom-adjacent dreams.
Victoria Muradi knows this better than most. As DA’s director of strategic initiatives, Muradi has overseen the school’s Innovation Journey Fund (IJF) since its inception in 2022. The fund is both a product of, and catalyst for, the third goal within the DA Strategic Vision: Innovate more boldly. In three years, it has done exactly that. The fund has supported more than 20 pilot projects — ranging from schoolwide sustainability efforts and learning support expansion, to the creation of a third grade pollinators project and CPR/AED/First Aid instruction and certification for Upper Schoolers.
But those journeys can’t begin without the most sacred of educator resources. As she asked prospective IJF applicants about the biggest impediment to their ideas, Muradi overwhelmingly heard about those same stubborn scarcities: time and space. Muradi and the Innovation Team came up with an innovation of their own. They created time, and space, for teachers.
And so the inaugural Innovation Sprint, held Oct. 25 in the Middle School Founders Room, was born. More than 20 attendees had three uninterrupted hours to talk through ideas — all in various stages of clarity and completion — with members of the Innovation Team. “That’s the goal and purpose of today,” Muradi said during her introductory remarks. She pointed to Goal 3 of the Strategic Vision and called particular attention to one action step: Create sandboxes for innovation and pilot testing.
“If innovation is a journey — and it’s a marathon — the idea of the sprint is to help you make big gains,” Muradi said later.
What does that look like over the course of an inspiring afternoon? Nothing less than well-intentioned, persistent colleagues racing toward dreams on behalf of students and families.
12:30 p.m. | The Shadows and Lamps
Claire Goldsmith knows innovation. The keynote speaker for DA’s first-ever Innovation Sprint is the former executive director of the Malone Schools Online Network, a national online learning consortium for independent schools that offers electives to high school students across the United States. She developed the network during her time at the Stanford Online High School. But before then, Goldsmith was an English and French teacher at Harvard-Westlake Middle School in Los Angeles. She started her school’s first debate team to better prepare students for the rigors of high school debate. Getting the team up and running, however, was more marathon than sprint.
“I had a little trouble knowing when to just listen and observe,” says Goldsmith, who was in her early 20s at the time, “and when to jump in and make changes.”
The theme of her 30-minute Zoom presentation was unmistakable, if for no other reason than it was also the title: “Shadows and Lamps.” Innovation, Goldsmith says, is a journey that toggles between extended stretches of darkness and bursts of illumination. She has learned over the years to ask herself two seemingly paradoxical yet profound questions while she formulates an idea: “Why me?” and “Why not me?”
Goldsmith signs off from the Zoom call. It’s time for DA educators to bring their ideas into the light.
1 p.m. | The Perfect Duo
The attendees in the Founders Room introduce themselves, and Patti Donnelly listens intently. The Middle School language arts teacher has taught for over 30 years, more than half of which she has spent at DA. The multiple binders that she hauled from her classroom to the Gateway Center provide evidence of the idea that she has shaped and kneaded and championed for the majority of her career: helping students to take ownership of their learning profiles. She needs to hear from someone whose perspective and insights could cast a lamplike glow on her shadowy notions. She finds it in Katie McEnroe.
They had never spoken before. McEnroe, a member of the Innovation Team, works as a dean of college counseling on the Upper School campus. But her work with college applicants — who spend years trying to discover both themselves and their place in the world — lends McEnroe a compatible lens for Donnelly’s vision. “I just want to give kids an understanding of, ‘What are some patterns and strengths and areas to work on that I see and what drives you to learn?’” Donnelly says. “If you’re going to be a lifelong learner, what’s something that’s sparking you right now? What lights you up right now? How can we play with that while we’re here [at DA]?”
Donnelly and McEnroe play with that very idea. Who would help Donnelly oversee the learning profiles at each division? How would the profiles carry over as a student matriculates to subsequent divisions? “What are three goals that would help you take this forward?” McEnroe asks. Donnelly later likens her conversation to driving on the highway with the windows down, carefree and uninhibited, as McEnroe gently points out a blindspot or two.
“It’s not all on me to figure it out,” Donnelly says. “I’ve got somebody else to help with that. That’s a big relief.”
“Is there a way, as the world changes, that we can better care for our kids in our community? I’ve always been centered around that idea, which pushed me into a space where I want to help people innovate.”
Katie McEnroe
Dean of College Counseling
2 p.m. | The Importance of Being Idle
Dan Gilson has ideas, too. “A million,” he says. But he doesn’t bring one to the Innovation Sprint. He doesn’t bring any outsize expectations, either. “All I’m looking for is a little bit of space,” he says.
It’s an understandable request from the director of Extended Day. He sits with his laptop at a table near the floor-to-ceiling windows that stretch across the back of the Founders Room. So, too, does Preschool Director Carolyn Howes, who sits diagonally across from Gilson. Howes also doesn’t come with any preconceived ideas or questions. She attends purely to lend her support to anyone who needs to consult her opinion.
Gilson and Howes had previously completed a workshop together. They start chatting. Soon the topic of teacher development and retention arises. They exchange ideas about a potential pipeline for developing teachers at the Preschool and Lower School: how it would look, how it could work, how it might benefit students.
Gilson stops himself. He smiles.
“I was like, ‘Oh, snap. We just innovation sprinted!’” he says. “It’s amazing.”
“If that was the space that was open once a month, I’d probably go every month.”
Dan Gilson
Director of Extended Day
2:30 p.m. | The Places Between the Solid Ground
elliott turnbull doesn’t come with ideas or the promise of submitting an IJF grant. The director of After-School Enrichments comes with a problem, and with the hopes of talking it through. They attend with Jeana Holdstock, the after-school private music coordinator, to see if they can figure out how to meet the overwhelming demand for private music lessons.
On this cloudless, 65-degree fall day, they leave the Founders Room and sit at a table in the Middle School courtyard with Dr. Andrew Prudhom, an Upper School math teacher and Innovation Team member. In the spirit of design thinking, Prudhom leads with empathy. He asks turnbull and Holdstock questions to better understand the history of after-school music and the logistics of after-school programming.
Coming away with an ironclad solution isn’t necessarily the hope, turnbull says. It’s about creating the space to consider the solution at all.
“Learning and change happen between the solid ground,” turnbull says. “In the movement forward that can happen when you take a walk to mold that question, you might come out of a 45-minute walk in the woods with more of a leap forward, right?”
“This is the semester where there’s no oxygen for me,” turnbull says. “And I did the sprint because I know it’s the weird, little leapfroggy dance of that gets you moving forward more progressively.
“If I were to not do that, we would be in the same stuck place.”
“There is something that we can’t quite untangle, and the other brains getting involved is typically going to help you. That’s what I was envisioning it to be, and that’s exactly what it ended up being.”
elliott turnbull
Director of After-School Enrichments
3:15 p.m. | The Breakthrough
Donnelly and McEnroe haven’t taken a break from their conversation. It has lasted long enough to recruit another participant: Karl Schaefer, the Middle School computer science academic leader and STEAM teacher, who arrives about halfway through the two-and-a-half hours of dedicated work time. The excitement, and hope, haven’t crested.
“Patti, Karl and a lot of people on this campus are so special to so many people,” McEnroe says later. “I just want their ideas to be nurtured — and even if it can’t happen in the way that Patti sees it, what can we do with that energy toward taking care of kids?”
By the end of their time together, Donnelly says she has some invaluable direction around her idea for learning profiles. She had been so torn about missing one of her language art classes to attend the Innovation Sprint that she asked her advisees about the potential impact of missing one class. But the Innovation Team’s pledge to find a substitute teacher, and the promise of a fulfilling afternoon, was too great to pass up. She knew she had to sprint, both for her idea and for her kids.
“When you’re trying to come up with something that’s new, innovative, bold, you’ve got to do it in a different way,” Donnelly says. “This is what that was for me. It was an open, safe space to play. And in that play, we were using both of our backgrounds to co-create something.”
Not a perfect idea. Not a finished product. But the time and space to make it a little more perfect, and a little more finished.