Setting Compass

Two Decades of Teaching: My Thoughts on Change and Direction for St. Patrick's

It is a simple fact that the nation's finest schools recognize their primary mission as that of substantive change: enabling it, creating it, responding to it. Even schools that fail to recognize that fact inevitably find themselves dealing with the reverberations of change—in the families of the children who come to school each day, in the communities in which schools exist, in the demands of the larger society, and in our growing awareness of how children learn best. Of course, schools seek fundamental changes in the young people who inhabit them, that they might become more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, more accomplished, more confident, and ultimately able to use these gifts for wise and exemplary purposes—aspirations that we as adults should hold for ourselves and each other, as well.

Now in my fifth year of leadership at St. Patrick's Episcopal Day School, my twenty-second year as a teacher and administrator in four different schools that educate young people, the centrality of change has never been more apparent to me. Yet the mere recognition of the need for change is insufficient. We must at the same time establish a way of thinking about and achieving change that is reasoned and intentional. With this document, "Setting Compass," I offer my vision of intentional, guided change—and a worthy destination—as we continue to sculpt the programs and opportunities at an institution that is already one of the Washington area's premier elementary schools.

While my long experience in schools cautions me to proceed with more modesty than certainty, there is no doubt that we must proceed. As we do so, please remember my deep and abiding commitment to lead St. Patrick's School, and lead it well, into the next century. The prospect is awesome and exciting. Please join me as we move ahead.

Peter A. Barrett, Fall 1998

A Personal Statement on Education, Values, and Guiding Principles For Our Work

In ways unmatched by most schools, St. Patrick's embraces the childhood of its students, who arrive in many instances just beyond the toddler stage and prepare to graduate on the brink of adolescence. As children of three, four, and five become eight, ten, and twelve years old, they learn much about themselves, about the world around them, and about others who inhabit that world. The opportunities for growth and change, and the students' willingness to participate in thoughtful, engaging, even exhilarating activities to promote that growth and change, will never be greater at any other period in their lives. Indeed, it is an exceptional moment we cannot waste.

Mindful of the importance of each component of the educational foundation set in childhood, St. Patrick's has developed a depth and breadth of curricular excellence. At the same time we develop an academic core of language arts and history, of mathematics and science, we enrich that core through religion, music, art, and technology. All curricular areas ground us in tradition, reveal fresh possibilities for innovation, and offer us ways to find new means of self-expression. Even with this commitment to strength across the curriculum, we can nonetheless center our work, grounding it in some larger sense of purpose, standard, and destination for the education we provide. As to education, I propose this larger purpose, standard, and destination shall be "Exceptional Literacy" for all our students. Across time, literacy is foundational for character, understanding, and academic excellence. As St. Patrick’s seeks and experiences change—and balances tradition and innovation—exceptional literacy can provide the touchstone for our efforts.

The spoken and written word enables human beings to interact with, understand, and influence the world around them, hence the primacy of an exceptional literacy for our students. The ability to comprehend and to organize the spoken and written word, and the struggle to accomplish that sometimes difficult task, prepare an individual to understand and communicate effectively with others, to seek new knowledge, and to fulfill a greater sense of personal responsibility. The inability to do so—at the intersection of what one educator calls "instances of wordlessness and experiences of powerlessness"—can result in alienation, thoughtlessness in the truest sense, and irresponsibility.*

While a focus on exceptional literacy orients us to the symbol system of language—which we employ as readers, writers, speakers, and listeners—we must never lose sight of literacy’s importance in other areas of the curriculum. Math, science, and technology, for example, and religion, art, and music generate their own literacy needs, which students must master if they are to achieve the depth of character, understanding, and academic excellence we envision. At the same time, these areas benefit from exceptional literacy as students and teachers achieve meaning jointly through conversation and shared activity and individually through exploring, reading, writing, and reflecting. We must apply the standard of exceptional literacy to all curricular areas and respond to each area’s particular literacy needs in order to achieve the textured sense of subject matter, self, and others that results from this work.

*Maxine Green, "Literacy for What?" Phi Delta Kappan, January 1982, pages 326-329.

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The Larger Framework

Our Goal

All our work should stand the test of excellence. One thing, however, should be so special, so "shiny," so universally valued that its primacy at St. Patrick's is clear to all. That one thing, the destination for our shared work in educating St. Patrick’s children, should be "exceptional literacy." Across time, it should emerge as the school’s basis for influencing character, advancing understanding, and promoting academic excellence for our children.

Measures of Our Success

With these measurements, we should hold ourselves accountable for the full development of the goals and values at the heart of St. Patrick's. In each area, we should organize to produce consistent excellence, innovation, and growth. That these measures exist should allow us to focus our time and wisely apply limited resources.

Values that Shape Our School

As a community, we should be able to articulate a set of fundamental values inspired by the parish that brought the school to life and by decades spent educating young children. We should hold these values to be true, universally, of children, and to be right, in a normative sense, for our school.

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I. Exceptional Literacy

Building Exceptional Literacy: Our Basis for Character, Understanding, and Academic Excellence

We expect that the buildings we enter will have a certain structural integrity, that they will stand in all kinds of weather and keep their inhabitants warm and dry. But buildings, and those who design, construct, and maintain them, should aspire to more than structural integrity. So, too, must exceptional literacy capture and maintain the mechanics of reading, writing, and speaking—of receiving and expressing written and oral language effectively—at the same time we recognize those mechanics are not our destination. Great architecture embraces a sound structural foundation but moves beyond that structure to design buildings with such obvious usefulness and beauty that they attract and engage inhabitants and passers-by alike. So should exceptional literacy instill in our students the means to lead articulate, purposeful, rewarding lives, as they acquire and put to effective use the words, attitudes, and conventions to comprehend and express meaning and to engage others in worthy purpose. What follows is a framework for engaging every St. Patrick’s student in the "Architecture of Literacy."

The Two Essential Parts

In the elementary school, exceptional literacy requires careful attention both to the structure of language and to its texture.* We might consider structure (often understood as a phonics- or skills-based approach) to be more mechanical, less creative, less interesting, and texture (often over-simplified as the whole language approach) to be richer, more enthralling, ultimately more beautiful. Only together, however, do these components achieve meaning—for an individual child or for an elementary school’s language and reading program. Only together do they build exceptional literacy. In the right hands, neither need endure the indignities of repetitive, lifeless instruction or the irrelevance of teaching not rooted in recognition of individual strengths and needs. In order to become literate individuals, our students must master both structure and texture and with them, gather the tools, the knowledge, and the attitudes needed for a lifetime of proper, effective, and beautiful use of language.

How We Begin

Among all the worthwhile things our children will do, learn, and experience, none will be more fundamental than developing an early, proficient literacy. Early literacy—not to be confused with early reading—prepares children for healthy relationships with others and for academic success, forms them into students, and marks them as individuals. For our Nursery and primary students, we establish early engagement in language-rich social and cognitive settings that encourage conversation, listening, and attention to words spoken and written. Across the Kindergarten year, these early abilities should gather strength as children themselves begin to emerge as capable readers and writers and form the essential skills and desire to do so. From the Grade 1 year through graduation at Grade 6, we picture our literacy work in three parts: the mastery of the structure of language; immersion in excellent literature; and the habit and practice of learning to speak and write well and with spirit and voice.

*Priscilla L. Vail, Common Ground: Whole Language and Phonics Working Together, Rosemont, NJ: Modern Learning Press, 1991.

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The Architecture of Literacy

While St. Patrick’s literacy work begins with what we call Language Arts, the concept of exceptional literacy goes well beyond a particular academic area; indeed, it goes well beyond mere academics. Language arts itself is, in truth, an array of language-related areas of study, including reading and literature, oral and written expression, vocabulary acquisition, and grammar and usage. Excellent literature—thoughtfully selected to engage, challenge, instruct, and excite our students—is at the center of that curriculum as an engine for our varied literacy work, which grows to include non-fiction texts in history and science, for example, and always involves the exploration and discussion of significant ideas across the curriculum. The complete St. Patrick’s curriculum seeks to build exceptional literacy with the following components.

Reading and Literature

St. Patrick’s expects to:

  • Create early love of being read to and of reading.
  • Provide direct instruction and diverse opportunities in structural and textural aspects of reading and related language arts—including proficiency in word recognition, strategies for identifying unfamiliar words, sound-symbol relationships in spelling, and ways of finding meaning and pleasure in written text—for emerging fluency.
  • Create the habit and practice of sustained daily reading, including DEAR—(D)rop (E)verything (A)nd (R)ead—time in school and nightly reading at home.
  • Make careful, thoughtful choices of literature texts, recognizing the merits of classic works, to read with children.
  • Select literature texts that engage and challenge, that are generative in their ability to encourage different ways of thinking and of seeing as they lead children beyond the surface of the text and enhance cognitive, social-emotional, and ethical growth.

Written and Oral Expression

St. Patrick’s expects to:

  • Create an awareness of the value of words in understanding and expressing ourselves, in understanding and communicating with others, and in understanding the world around us.
  • Increase children’s desire and ability to express clearly and thoughtfully in words their needs, emotions, knowledge, ideas, questions, and confusion.
  • Encourage children to know when to speak and when to listen, when to be sure to make their voices heard and when to pay particular attention to another’s voice.
  • Enable students to become writers by being writers, every day, in every class, with every opportunity they get.
  • Teach the conventions of written and spoken language as students engage in the related crafts of writing and speaking.
  • Develop the distinctive voice in every child.
  • Recognize in written work a synthesis of ideas, imagination, values, organization, and skill.

Conventions: The Mechanics of Language

St. Patrick’s expects to provide:

  • Lessons in sound-symbol relationships begin in Nursery and become more extensive beginning with phonics lessons in Kindergarten and Grade 1.
  • Direct instruction in spelling begins in Grade 1.
  • Formal usage instruction beginning in Grade 1 but preceded by work in punctuation and capitalization within the context of frequent early writing opportunities.
  • Structured vocabulary acquisition in Grades 2 and 3 and beyond, following the active encouragement of the vocabulary explosion characteristic of a child’s earliest language experiences.
  • Formal grammar instruction, nested in frequent student writing and as a separate course of study, beginning in the Upper School


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Measurements of Success

Those Goals Around Which We Should Organize Our Work, Our Thought, Our Life as a School Community

#1 Each Child to Fullest Potential

At the heart of St. Patrick's philosophy is the recognition of the infinite value of each student as a child of God. Our children arrive uniquely gifted, each one worthy of respect and challenge. The same academic or physical task, however, is never equally challenging for every child. Our program therefore makes room for a high degree of individuality: child by child, we set and nurture goals that will result in significant accomplishment. Whatever their gifts, we should expect our students to reach for their fullest possible measure of achievement. Indeed, we should expect students to desire to achieve their highest potential as they join us on a journey of discovery about the world, themselves, and others.

#2 Curricular Excellence, Throughout

The whole of St. Patrick's curriculum is rich and engaging. Our strong traditional core of language arts, math, science, and history and social studies blends innovative techniques with clear, strong objectives for content and accomplishment, as do religion, music, and art. Engaged in an on-going dialogue about what in the world of ideas is most worth teaching in nursery and elementary schools, colleagues work across subject areas to offer children important ways of seeing the world and developing self-expression. Further, we have defined specific goals for technology, linking it to broader curricular objectives, especially in organizing and producing written work. Across the board, excellence should exist, be pursued, and be supported in every curricular area at St. Patrick's. Anything we choose to teach, we should organize to teach uncommonly well

#3 Exceptional Literacy Is the Centerpiece of Our Curriculum

From a deep bench of curricular excellence, one area should emerge as the "first among equals," that area we stress, disproportionately. "Exceptional literacy," defined as age- or developmentally-appropriate mastery of the structure and texture of language, becomes the goal we hold for each student and the skill we look to demonstrate in every subject area. While the teaching of literacy (reading, writing, and language mechanics) will be done largely in our strong language arts and history and social studies programs, literacy goes beyond any individual subject. Indeed, math, science, technology, art, and music have their own literacy demands in which our educational program engages our students. The literacy we should seek is ultimately the ability to understand and influence the world around us and to use language and other forms of communication to create and articulate meaningful, purposeful lives.

#4 Function, Safety, and Beauty of Church-School Campus

The buildings in which our church-school life unfolds should continue to be aspirational spaces - designed with functional integrity, filled with beauty, and always enhancing a child's desire to learn and grow. There are many potential uses for "bricks and mortar," including sidewalks and lighting, parking, more instructional space, a stand-alone library, and technology space closer to classrooms. We should test all potential changes to our physical plant for their aesthetic contribution to our school and their concrete contributions to function and safety. Finally, we should ensure that any changes in the physical spaces we inhabit will enhance either our educational program, the ease with which a teacher can teach, or our shared quality of life at St. Patrick's.

#5 Parents Are Full and Valued Partners in Our Work

St. Patrick's believes that a strong working relationship between home and school is necessary for each child to enjoy the optimal educational experience. Such a relationship facilitates the development of shared values and aspirations for our children and creates opportunities for adult growth in our understanding of these children. We recognize parents as a child's first and most formative teachers, and we should involve them, in substantive ways and with great frequency, in their children's lives at school. For years, the imagination, talents, and commitment of its parents have enriched St. Patrick's. This tradition should continue even as we seek new ways for parents to participate.

#6 Faculty Consider St. Patrick's a "Destination Posting" for Exceptional Teachers

Great teachers never stop learning. Recognizing that fact, St. Patrick's has created a "teaching culture," where traditional techniques are enriched with experimentation and innovation, as exceptional professionals give "total engagement" to the meritorious, vigorous task of teaching young children. Maintaining their focus on exceptional teaching, faculty members rely on "practitioner-inquiry" to advance their own professional knowledge and that of colleagues. In return, St. Patrick's should provide unmatched respect, resources, and growth opportunities for teachers. With the continued development of our recruiting philosophy, and with the expansion of opportunities we provide for the development of our teachers themselves, St. Patrick's will become, over time, a "Destination Posting" for exceptional teachers.

#7 Technological Literacy Across the Curriculum

In the elementary years, a child's critical encounters are with other people, not with machines. At the same time, proficient technological literacy is increasingly valuable, even now and certainly later in life. With these twin, potentially contradictory, goals in mind, St. Patrick's Technology Master Plan specifies (and therefore limits) the Kindergarten - Grade 6 "tool kit" of skills and applications each child will master. These choices are intended to support broader literacy goals in organizing, writing, and producing text, and, for older students, in research and writing. St. Patrick's already has state-of-the-art technology in its two well-equipped labs staffed by full-time instructors. In the next three years, we should make technology even more integral to our curriculum and more accessible from homeroom classrooms. We should also expand faculty training to provide for ease and competence for all our community.

#8 At Graduation, Placement Options Abound

As St. Patrick's is an elementary school ending in Grade 6, our stewardship includes our students' middle school placement. In partnership with St. Patrick's families, the school is both guide and advocate for each student's next academic step. For every graduate, there should exist plentiful, worthy placement options. Intense during the Grade 6 year, the preparation for matriculation continues across the whole of the St. Patrick's experience, as students learn to achieve academically and as they become individuals with unique gifts, character, and voice. Without compromising the integrity and age-appropriate nature of our program, St. Patrick's should continue to attend to the inevitability of a next step and to the school's vital role in advocacy and preparation.

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III. Fundamental Values

What We Believe To Be True Of Children, What We Should Stand For As A School

#1 Moral and Spiritual Growth, Inspired by the Judeo-Christian Tradition

Our relationship with St. Patrick's Episcopal Church is a central, distinguishing feature of life at the Day School and the foundation of the system of values we embrace. The education of our children is inspired by our church-school identity and reflects it with our commitment to their moral and spiritual growth and to their participation in the values and service to others found at the heart of the Episcopal tradition.

#2 Each Child, Able and Gifted

St. Patrick's is unique for actively seeking out a range of gifts and talents in its students. While many of our students arrive superbly prepared for academic success, St. Patrick's should never become a narrowly defined elite. Instead, we embrace the boundless potential of childhood, when a fascination with the world reveals a range of possibilities unmatched at any other time, when excellence can be taught and modeled. We believe that seeking out a range of gifts places emphasis (for us, correctly) on the growth and potential of childhood, and that each child arrives worthy of respect, high standards, and achievement. All our children should leave St. Patrick's with a deep sense of the infinite value of every individual and, ultimately, of the importance of applying their gifts to wise and worthy purposes.

#3 Continual Growth

That our children will grow and change is a given. So, too, must adults continue to learn and grow and change, a process that those who educate children must embrace with deliberateness and intentionality. As teachers pursue their own professional development, we learn more about how children learn and identify new methods and materials to foster that learning process. This embrace of continual growth also extends to our educational program. Committed to excellence, we will maintain on-going review and improvement of our curriculum, accomplished with coherence and consistency, and articulated with clarity to current and prospective families.

#4 Nurture in Rigor, Rigor in Nurture

We recognize that we need not choose between being a warm, nurturing, joyful place— where children see that they are known, respected, and loved—and one that sets challenging standards for our children's academic work, for their sense of responsibility, and for their behavior. To choose one over the other suggests an impoverished understanding of how one nurtures children, of what truly brings them a sense of joy and self-worth. In this pairing of rigor and nurture, St. Patrick's can find its unique style and position.

#5 A Community of Many Faces, Many Voices

St. Patrick's is a better place because it welcomes children, families, faculty, and staff members who demonstrate the range of differences that enrich humanity. We stand for tolerance, inclusivity, and the deep-seated belief in the value of all God's children. Even as an Episcopal parish day school, we are "made whole" by children and families from a variety of faith traditions. Likewise, we seek community members who reflect a range of racial, cultural, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds (and physical challenges, to the extent we can provide an appropriate setting). Just as we stand for inclusivity, so should our educational program fairly embrace content of excellent quality that represents the range of faces, voices, and differences that we find in the world around us.

#6 The Habit of Service, A Grateful Heart

Children and adults at St. Patrick's are blessed with a bounty of talents, gifts, and opportunities. The fullest expression of gratitude for these opportunities is found not just as each child and adult strives for individual excellence and responsibility, but also as each individual learns to give back, to serve others, and to be a constructive part of building a better world.