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

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 l...

You can feel it in the air: the indescribable yet readily recognizable excitement of the start of a new school year - in our boys, teachers, families, administrators, and staff. Below, I share excerpts from my opening letter that speak to our 2024-25 school-wide theme, "Strong Values:" "To-morrow I cease to be a puppet, and I become a boy like you and all the other boys."* We teach boys. That’s what we do. And we want our boys to think for themselves. And we want that thinking to be rooted in and guided by “strong values”—our school-wide theme this year, found in the last line of the mission’s second paragraph. In keeping with the school’s classical tradition, these strong values are shaped at Saint David’s by the cardinal and theological virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and courage, along with faith, hope, and charity. To many Western philosophers, possession of these virtues makes a person good, happy, and thriving. Something we want for all of our sons. ...