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

Providing our boys with opportunities to engage in meaningful projects with their peers from neighboring girls' schools engenders interpersonal competencies of collaboration, communication, and respect.  Last year, our eighth graders joined with their eighth-grade peers from Marymount School for an inaugural series of performance-oriented workshops on the iconic Shakespearean love story Romeo and Juliet, conducted by professional teaching artists and English and Drama faculty from both schools.  We also launched a new weekly theatre arts class for the schools' seventh and eighth graders, which has proven very popular and culminates in a co-production of one-act plays. In addition, both schools participated in a special project with Disney Theatricals to present the first reading of a new concert in development for licensing.  New this year is a collaboration with girls from The Spence School. When our Music Director Jeffrey Moore was asked to reach out to a girls' school...

The bus transporting our sixth graders back to school after their overnight trip to Frost Valley Camp in the Catskills arrived on 89th Street this afternoon filled with animated, happy - and, perhaps a bit tired and rumpled - boys who already were sharing stories from their first overnight experience as a class. Over two days, Frost Valley’s “Challenge with Choice” philosophy provided the boys the opportunity to challenge themselves by solving problems as a group and individually, while also emphasizing the importance of respecting individual differences. As the boys operated outside their comfort zones in various outdoor activities, including high-ropes courses, they learned to lean on and build trust with each other and to build confidence within themselves. Last month, over three days at The Pocono Environmental Education Center, our seventh graders conducted field work in forest and stream ecology, including wading in streams and collecting water and specimen samples, traversing hi...

The following article by Bradford Hardie and Sam Woolford appears in the latest issue of Saint David's Magazine. A boy is Truth with dirt on its face, Beauty with a cut on its finger, Wisdom with bubble gum in its hair, and the Hope of the future with a frog in its pocket.” A great deal has changed since 1954 when Reader’s Digest published Alan Beck’s essay, “What Is A Boy?”—a mere three years after the founding of Saint David’s School. What has not changed in the last seven decades is the exploratory nature of our boys. The idea that learning can be messy is a common thread in the hands-on learning experiences throughout the Fifth Grade science curriculum at Saint David’s, and it all begins with a question. In Fifth Grade science class in the fall, boys find themselves asking one question, over and over: “How can we make our work easier?” While the transition from Fourth Grade to Fifth can be a big challenge for some, this question is not about schoolwork. Fifth graders learn abou...