School Faculty Notes

Newtown High School teachers Lee Keylock and Kerry Baldwin recently received a minigrant to attend weekend-long workshops at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. Ms Keylock attended “Fictions: Memory and Imagination,” which focused, she said, on the connections between memoir, autobiography, and fiction [as a means] to become more aware of fiction as a way of thinking as well as a literary genre.

Ms Baldwin attended “Writing to Read Visual Texts,” a workshop inviting teachers of all subjects to consider deciding which visual texts to study and the ways in which different writing strategies yield different kinds of information about painting, photography, or graphics. In addition, she noted, “Writing to Read” visual texts help develop students’ abilities as writers and thinkers.

To learn more about either workshop, contact Ms Keylock or Ms Baldwin at 426-7646.

The Head O’ Meadow website, created by Amy Nosal, was recently selected by the ConneCT Kids Committee as the featured school website for the month of January. For more information, visit www.kids.state.ct.us.

The entire Newtown Middle School language department, consisting of Norman Begin, Nicole Morris, Sarito Chandler, Michelle Tomassio, and Nancy Maxwell, recently attended the annual Connecticut Council of Language Teachers Conference.

Head O’ Meadow’s math teachers and educational assistants are currently involved in a professional development series, “Relearning to Teach Arithmetic,” facilitated by math/science specialist Gail Maletz. Designed to support development of students’ mathematical thinking and their understanding of whole-number computation, the workshops include viewing videotaped classroom vignettes and analyzing the logic of students’ thinking to consider what underlies the development of fluency in carrying out numerical operations.