Two years after the launch of Durham Academy’s Strategic Vision — an aspirational set of goals to help prepare students for an “unscripted and uncertain future” — students are feeling the benefits of the innovators’ mindset that has infused the school, while a startup-like excitement over future projects continues to percolate among teachers.
Several of those students and teachers offered an update on current projects and initiatives inspired by the Strategic Vision in a recent Family Matters Speaker Series event.
Associate Head of School Kristen Klein helped to introduce the presentation — attended by parents, caregivers, faculty, staff and a handful of students — by reflecting on the Strategic Vision journey thus far. Much of the conversation and research that eventually informed the Strategic Vision took place prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We did all of this work before there was this massive change in our world,” Klein said. “Is it still resonant? And the conclusion that we came to is absolutely. In fact, the vision was designed to help prepare our students for an unscripted and uncertain future. We knew the future was going to be unscripted before the pandemic, and the pandemic was a perfect [example of] just how unscripted the future was going to be.”
The Strategic Vision — which was unveiled in fall 2021 — comprises four ambitious goals:
- Goal 1: Prepare our students for life.
- Goal 2: Meet the needs of our learners.
- Goal 3: Innovate more boldly.
- The Foundation: Broaden and deepen our work with Diversity, Equity and Engagement.
“We really wanted a vision that would help us understand how to shift the work that we’re doing in response to that unscripted and changing future. So this plan is more aspirational and less tactical and may actually guide us for longer than three to five years,” Klein said. “[One] thing about this plan that is really different — in my experience in schools — is this is the first time that all of the folks in the community know what the plan is without looking it up in a spreadsheet and have really owned the work of the plan.”
Director of Strategic Initiatives Victoria Muradi, who is project-managing the Strategic Vision work, offered those who were gathered in the Middle School Gateway Center a preview of the mini presentations on tap for the morning:
“Our administrators see a lot of these stories every day, and our students see or are a part of these stories in snippets throughout their day,” she said, “but not until you pan back and look at the whole pre-k through 12 experience, do you really fully appreciate what an extraordinary place this school is and what amazing, remarkable capacity we have within it.”
Co-Teaching Pilot
Chris Mason, fourth-grade teacher and Lower School assistant director, and Lauren Miller, fourth-grade teacher
Thanks to a novel collaboration in the classroom, two fourth-grade teachers have been better able to find balance professionally and personally, and their students have benefited in the process. Chris Mason and Lauren Miller are co-teaching the Mustangs fourth-grade class — an arrangement that has made it possible for Mason to step into an administrative role as Lower School assistant director, and for Miller to have a slightly reduced workload as a busy parent of young children.
“The school and the Strategic Vision committee realized that Lower School teachers were underrepresented in administrative responsibilities and admin roles,” Mason explained. At the elementary school level, the day is typically structured in a way that requires lead classroom teachers to be student-facing for the full school day, making it challenging for them to tag in on leadership responsibilities or to have the flexibility enjoyed by professionals in many other careers.
Miller leads the class about two-thirds of the day, while Mason does so about one-third of the time (fulfilling his assistant director duties two-thirds of the day) — and there are times when they are in the classroom at the same time. The teaching team also includes part-time teaching assistant Jay Dillon, who spends his afternoons working with student-athletes as an athletic trainer.
As assistant director, Mason is able to help Lower School Director Carolyn Ronco with the massive workload that comes along with leading a division of nearly 300 students and about 60 faculty members: “I’m kind of taking on this role of teacher-coach, and I’m really giving a hard look at the curriculum and helping with operations.”
Miller has seen the benefits to students as well: “In addition to being strategic thought partners and really looking more deeply about what we’re doing and why, I think the students are happy. They feel connected to both of us. They have different relationships with two different teachers and their different styles, which I think prepares them for Middle School and beyond.”
Watch Mason and Miller’s Presentation
Math Modeling
Forrest Hinton, Upper School math teacher
This fall, math teachers Forrest Hinton and Jarrod Jenzano are co-teaching Advanced Math Modeling, a new Upper School course that brings real-world relevance to the math classroom. The math modeling program began last year as a competitive club, with support from the Strategic Vision’s Innovation Journey Fund. The club was so well-received that math modeling was selected as one of the first Advanced (ADV) offerings this year, marking the beginning of Durham Academy’s shift toward a highly tailored, fully DA-designed curriculum for its most rigorous courses by 2024–2025.
“Math modeling is when you have a big, complicated question that you’re trying to solve from really any discipline — it can be physics, architecture, political science, business — and you’re using all the mathematics you know as tools to help you do some analysis to solve that problem and answer the questions you have,” Hinton explained at the Strategic Vision in Action presentation.
He and Jenzano are “throwing some big, tough questions” at students, like how to combat a city’s rise in crime, the most efficient way to board an airplane, and the fairest way to map North Carolina’s congressional districts.
“This is a class that’s really about mathematical play, it’s about questioning, it’s about questioning and critiquing your ideas, about refining your ideas,” Hinton said, “and using math in a way that … people use it in the real world.”
STEAM by Design
Video created by Karl Schaefer, lead learner, STEAM by Design
In the Middle School’s STEAM by Design course — offered as an elective to seventh- and eighth-graders — students take a deep dive into the design-thinking process. They embrace failure and the joys and frustrations of “trying and trying again” as they explore coding, augmented reality, 3D printing, robotics and the like.
In this video — created by Karl Schaefer, “lead learner” of STEAM by Design — students discuss the iterative process of creating robots in the new STEAM Design Studio.
SEED
Adam Cluff, Upper School English teacher and varsity boys basketball coach
Twelve members of Durham Academy’s faculty and staff are part of Durham Academy’s first cohort of SEED, a national organization that brings people together “to learn through self-reflection, build relationships through structured dialogue, and create change through systemic analysis.”
Upper School English teacher Adam Cluff, Upper School science teacher Dr. Uma Mahajan and After-School Enrichments Coordinator elliott turnbull are serving as facilitators for the DA group.
Cluff, who engaged in SEED seminars at a previous school, described the experience as transformative: “In my experience, SEED is not merely professional development. SEED did nothing less than change my interior monologue. It rewired my brain.
“My default setting, which I was not aware of until after my SEED training, was to cultivate one role: When can I next speak? SEED planted the impetus to listen, to share the airtime, to understand that I’ve been socialized to think I was always entitled to speak, [that I] should always be speaking,” he continued. “This has changed how I interact with my friends, with my wife, with my colleagues, with my students.
“And while I’m constantly aware of these personal transformations that SEED has brought about for me, it can be less immediately visible to see how SEED ripples out beyond its direct participants. It can be hard to see how SEED is institutionally transformative. One way that I’ve come to understand how SEED creates institutional change is that it instills awareness in every participant that we always have work to do individually and collectively to seek and create inclusion and equity.”
District C Teamship/Problem-Solving for Real Businesses
Shannon Harris, Upper School librarian and District C coach
In perfect alignment with Goal 1 of the Strategic Vision, “Prepare Our Students for Life,” is the Upper School’s partnership with District C, an organization that empowers high schoolers to solve real-world problems for businesses and organizations.
Librarian Shannon Harris teaches an Upper School course in partnership with District C called Problem-Solving for Real Businesses, and she serves as a coach for the District C Teamship extracurricular club and upcoming Durham Academy Summer offering.
Through the course and club, Durham Academy students have used design-thinking to tackle real problems for both local and national businesses, including Zweli’s, Students First Consulting and Skillsoft.
“At the core of this program is giving skills to the students that they will need in all businesses and beyond,” Harris explained. “Like Kristen [Klein] was saying, we don’t know what technology is going to bring or artificial intelligence is going to do, but what students are always going to need to know how to do is work collaboratively with all different kinds of people to solve novel problems that pop up here and there — to problem-solve and to communicate with your stakeholders.”
Sustainability
Frankie Stover ’24 and Cana Yao ’26
“When I think of Durham Academy’s sustainability program, ‘innovating boldly’ is one of the first things that comes to my mind,” senior Frankie Stover ’24 said at the Strategic Vision in Action presentation. “Durham Academy has not waited for other schools and government leaders to take action. Students are more engaged and excited than ever to help their community because they feel like their opinions are valued and important.”
Stover spoke with Cana Yao ’26, a fellow member of the Student Government Sustainability Committee, about the progress that they’ve seen since an Innovation Journey Fund grant was awarded to support sustainability efforts at DA. Upper School students hosted the first-ever Sustain-In, a 14-hour lock-in event that aimed to generate novel sustainability proposals.
“One of those proposals was a biodiversity proposal that would rewild parts of DA’s campus with native plants. This proposal became the seed for a new course called Biodiversity in Action that will debut this spring at the Upper School,” Stover said. “Faculty also have opportunities to design new units and courses, such as Dr. Mahajan’s Science, Society and Social Justice, an elective that focuses on the intersections of human issues and science. I’m a student in this class, and it has expanded my ways of thinking.”
Yao talked about Science In Action, a course she participated in as a Middle Schooler that resulted in the installation of a rain garden to mitigate stormwater runoff from the Arts & World Languages Center parking lot.
“I learned how to work with others, break up big problems and combine different skill sets to come up with solutions all while honing my skills, ranging from experimental design to public speaking,” she recalled. “More than that is the way that the entire project connected academic knowledge to real-world issues. I got to look at my work for the first time and think, this really matters, and for me, that was and still is the best possible motivation.”
