David O'Halloran, Headmaster - Saint David's School, New York City

In the following  Wisdom Within post, Visiting TBI Scholar Dr. Ric Campbell continues his blog series on our faculty’s reflective practice program. This entry explores how three Saint David's teachers collaborated to build "self regulated" students: "expert learners who take increasing control over their learning while participating as respectful, caring members of their classroom learning community." LEARNING AS DELIBERATE PRACTICE “If schools are going to help all students become expert learners, the metacognitive capabilities of learners must be acknowledged, cultivated, and exploited. Students must be actively engaged in their own learning and knowledge building; they must be able to effectively direct their personal quest for knowledge and skills, to judge for themselves whether they understand, and to know what to do when they need more information.”  [1] Perhaps the two most important outcomes of learning across the rich and varied curriculum at Saint Dav...

Imagine being 13 or 14 years old, standing before any one of a number of architectural masterpieces in Italy and teaching your peers about it.  Our eighth graders did this and so much more during their just completed 10-day Italian Study Tour of Assisi, Florence, and Rome. The trip provided the opportunity for the boys to visit in-situ the actual paintings, sculpture, and architectural sites they have studied and researched in their art history class. At each site, they deepened their understanding through reflective journaling and sketching what they saw. Some examples: At Santa Croce, an eighth grader teaches his classmates about the Niccolo Matas, the Jewish architect who designed the basilica's facade: “You can see the Star of David at the top of the Church, despite it being Franciscan.”   At ll Duomo, a boy shares the design considerations that went into constructing Filippo Brunelleschi's dome: "They used an octagon shape and ribs to help support and distribute the ...

On February 5, 1951, one teacher welcomed four young boys through the black doors of a new  independent elementary school's single building at 12 East 89th Street in New York City. Today, Saint David's School welcomes more than 400 boys each day to a campus comprising six contiguous buildings and more than130 faculty and staff. The week of February 2, 2026, we celebrated the 75th anniversary of that first school day.  Colorful balloons set the stage on Monday for a festive Founders’ Week that featured celebratory activities for everyone: an all-grades anniversary trivia competition – (Congratulations to J.S.’26 whose knowledge of Saint David’s history earned him an 8/10 score.), anniversary t-shirt, poster-size all-school photo, Saint David’s Birthday Cake at lunch, and a custom cookie to close out the week.  And, our anchor events  –  the 75th Jubilee celebratory mass and Parents Association’s Excelsior Benefit – were testaments to the deep bonds that unite our...

In our continuing efforts through the Teaching Boys Initiative at Saint David's School ™ , one of our visiting scholars, Dr. Ric Campbell, engages in ongoing reflective practice with our faculty. Below, Dr. Campbell shares an example of a freewriting initiative that was born from the collaboration between literature teacher Jamie MacNeille and history teacher Drew Burton, who sought to address forms of student engagement in their respective disciplines.  WRITING and THINKING:  A Learning Community Engaged in the Knowledge-Making Practices of the Disciplines “Whoa, this freewriting is really helpful !” The above quote by a sixth-grade literature student captures a revelatory moment; he has discovered the wealth of ideas at the end of his pen as he writes to describe what he is noticing in the novel the class is reading and discovers that what he notices leads to questions, and that those questions, in turn, lead to bigger ideas. “All there is to thinking is seeing something not...

Our faculty are doing groundbreaking work leveraging our new professional development model, the Teaching Boys Initiative at Saint David’s School™ (TBI) to enhance their teaching, optimize our boys’ engagement and learning, and continue their professional growth as lifelong learners. In so doing, we ensure the use of mission-driven, evidence-based tools and strategies in the classroom.  At last Friday’s PA Meeting, Director of Teaching and Learning Jamie MacNeille, TBI Visiting Scholar Ric Campbell, Research Coordinator Tori Gilbert, and Director of Supervision and Evaluation Nora Sundar were joined by seven faculty members across disciplines and grades (Jarrett Culotta, Sophie Firestein, Leslie Geary, Frankie White Levin, Kevin Neylon, Cathy O’Neill, and Kate Samuels ), who have engaged in reflective practice within the three branches of TBI: Onboarding/Mentoring, Supervision and Evaluation, and Research Programs, which all operate under our common, customized professional develop...

On any given school day, along the East 90th Street Ferry Pier you may see a group of 12- and 13-year-old boys from Saint David’s with their teachers, using professional tools to carefully monitor and measure oysters and water quality. Working in partnership with the Billion Oyster Project, they are citizen scientists helping to restore the oyster population in New York Harbor. The boys will return to their science labs and use their new knowledge and understanding about water quality to construct water tanks. They also take this knowledge with them on a three-day trip to the Pocono Environmental Education Center, where they conduct field work in the mountains, comparing the water quality of streams with that of the East River.  These learning experiences, outside of a classroom setting, allow boys to engage in real-world work, ask real-world questions, and be part of real-world solutions. They are an ideal way to reach and teach boys. Because boys are active. They learn best by do...