Bringing Forth Potential: Academic Support and Enrichment at Baldwin

By Pia Awal Beirne

Athlete, model, and advocate Aimee Mullins gave a TED Talk in 2009 titled The Opportunity of Adversity. She eloquently states, "If you can open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You're teaching them to open doors for themselves."  She explains that the word "educate" comes from the root word "educe," meaning "to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential." Her speech reminds me of our responsibility to help open doors, break down barriers, and build up students' hope, curiosity, and love of learning.

As research in learning and the brain continues to advance, the landscape of support and enrichment has evolved significantly. We are eager to stay current on the latest research on how girls learn best. We have expanded our knowledge about the intersection of emotional well-being and academic success. Here at Baldwin, we believe in the educational potential and learning abilities of our girls and collaborate closely to support their personal, holistic growth and development. As outlined in Pillar Three of our Strategic Plan, developing a growth-mindset philosophy, one that promotes innovative teaching strategies and celebrates personal growth and success, will lead to joyful lifelong learning.

 

Since I joined Baldwin as the Director of Academic Support and Enrichment in 2018, our commitment to academic support and enrichment has grown in myriad ways. Our department has expanded from 2.3 to 5 full-time learning specialists, reflecting the increasing value our community places on understanding how students learn. More families are seeking information about their daughter's learning profile — information that is truly empowering. When students understand their strengths and areas of need, they gain essential insights into how they learn best. We have also deepened our knowledge about developing executive functioning skills throughout a child's education and creating lessons and assessments that meet students at their individual level of challenge. This growth reflects our belief that when we understand each student as a learner, we can help her reach her fullest potential.

 

While teachers are an essential resource to parents when they have questions about the content covered in a particular area, learning specialists offer a sharply focused lens. We understand how the brain develops through the course of a student’s journey and how students consolidate their understanding of essential skills so that they can apply them to more complex tasks. We frequently have conversations with families about how they can support their student at home with time management, between active and passive study strategies, and provide a variety of resources when a student needs additional academic or social-emotional support. To this end, we also collaborate closely with the Counseling and Well-Being department at Baldwin, where we have one or more dedicated counselors in each division. Daily, our team works with students, faculty, and administrators across all three divisions to share knowledge, collaborate on best practices, and help students understand how they learn best.

In the Lower School, we see the broadest range of student abilities, as is developmentally appropriate. Our learning specialists, Dr. Marissa Truong and Eileen Cianfrani, work closely with teachers throughout the year, using assessment data to determine each student's strengths and opportunities for growth in literacy, math, and other learning areas. They create small, flexible instructional groups for targeted instruction, meeting with students 1-5 times a week. This systematic instruction is monitored regularly to ensure steady progress. All Lower School students receive progress monitoring at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, and our small class sizes allow teachers to closely monitor student development. Additionally, our Math Learning Specialist, Eileen Cianfrani, provides enrichment opportunities for students in Grades K-5. Our learning specialists also work closely with students who require additional support in executive functioning, an area that we recognize as integral to success for our students.

 

In Middle School, our work begins with our Learning Strategies course, which all sixth graders take at the beginning of the year. We teach note-taking methods, study strategies, and methods for inferring main ideas from non-fiction texts. We discuss organizing time and materials, conducting research, citing sources, and much more to build their skills and abilities.

 

All middle school students have a Resource block that meets once or more each week, during which they can work on homework, meet with teachers, or study for assessments. Learning Specialists work with teachers, grade-level deans, and the counseling team to monitor students' academic and social-emotional well-being. In Middle School, our Learning Specialist, Aura Gersenson, provides in-class support for both students and teachers. This may look like: reviewing effective note-taking strategies, supporting students in breaking down long-term assignments such as research projects into smaller action steps, and helping students make a study guide for an upcoming test. Middle School is an essential time for our Baldwin Bears to learn study skills and organizational competencies, as well as build resilience to achieve their own personal success. 

 

In Upper School, the Learning Center is a place where students find a community space filled with resources such as textbooks, large white boards, index cards, and, most importantly, camaraderie — peers who are focused on their learning and curiosity with support as needed from learning specialists.

 

Over the course of the four years, our US Learning Specialist, Alyssa Kolowrat, and I have developed strong relationships with students who meet with us for support. We work with students in individualized sessions that begin with discussions about what's going well and what presents challenges. This helps students reflect on their habits and allows us to determine what support will help each student reach their personal goals.

 

Upper School students realize that their schedules are busy, and one way in which we commonly work with our students is to support them in figuring out how to balance their time between co-curricular activities and schoolwork. Other ways in which we support our students are similar to the work we do in the other divisions — breaking down multi-step assignments into smaller pieces, discussing complex readings one paragraph at a time, reviewing class notes to solve math or science problems, and creating lists of homework and study tasks. We also teach active study strategies. Students often think re-reading notes is effective, but research shows the brain must practice retrieving knowledge through active methods, including synthesizing and then teaching the material to someone else.

 

When asked whether the Baldwin academic environment feels like it’s too rigorous, a junior student recently stated, "It's a good kind of pressure. Everyone who comes out of Baldwin is really prepared for life and really successful. In public school, I didn't have to try that hard, now I push myself." These insights highlight why one of our central goals is to help students build their self-advocacy skills. We prepare our Baldwin students to graduate with a comprehensive understanding of how they learn best and what they need in order to succeed. At Baldwin, we equip our students with the skills and confidence they need in order to thrive in the next stage of their academic lives.

 

Throughout a student’s journey at Baldwin, we believe that celebrating risk-taking, hard work, and accomplishments — however small — is central to building students' confidence. At Baldwin, we take our role as educators seriously and truly embrace the essence of education, which fundamentally means to bring forth what is within each student.

 

Aimee Mullin’s speech reminds us of our responsibility to open doors, break down barriers, and foster hope, curiosity, and a love of learning among our students. More importantly, when I observe students utilizing our academic enrichment and support services and experiencing improved academic performance, increased engagement, enhanced critical thinking skills, and greater confidence, along with improved concentration and self-awareness, it reinforces our unwavering commitment to our mission and to every student. We strive to be at the forefront of providing girls with what they need and are therefore constantly evolving, innovating, and planning the next step to ensure the best outcome for our girls.

About the author: Pia Awal Beirne is the Director of Academic Support and Enrichment at The Baldwin School.