There's a buzz in the classroom, a steady purr that revs every few minutes with excitement. "We're making a chair we can actually sit on; and they're going to build a vehicle!" one second grader jumps up to explain to a visitor. He points to a group of three boys huddled together working furiously on the carpet at the front of the classroom. "And they're making a mansion." All out of recycled cardboard, fasteners, and tape. The boys are working through the engineering cycle to build their own large-scale cardboard projects, collaborating in teams to create a functional structure. Active learning, motor activity, making products, teamwork and competition, all of these elements, called transitive factors, are at play in this science unit. At Saint David's, through our Teaching Boys Initiative, faculty are partnering with our resident visiting scholar Dr. Michael Reichert, renowned researcher in boys' education. Dr. Reichert and his co-research
Saint David's prioritizes faculty development through research-informed programming. Our teachers are supported to continually learn and grow in their professions, allowing us to stay abreast of and advance best practices in teaching and learning for boys. During the last school year, we awarded 53 research grants, and this summer alone 20 faculty members enrolled in one or more of our new professional development opportunities. Below, from our current issue of Saint David's Magazine, Upper School Mathematics Teacher David Lane shares what he learned from his 2023 summer study grant about harnessing curiosity for learning as it emerges in the mathematics classroom. If you add an infinite number of positive numbers together, will the sum always be infinitely large? Is the number 0.999… (repeating) less than 1? Can all numbers be organized from least to greatest? To the surprise, confusion, and fascination of many of my students, the answer to these three questions is no! I lo