Avenues: The World School

SAGE Education Conference August 8-10, 2018 New York City Welcome to Avenues: The World School SAGE Educational Conference

About Avenues: The World School Avenues: The World School was founded in 2010 with the vision to establish one school with many campuses that are intentionally connected and interdependent, located in leading global cities. Avenues is one highly integrated learning community, supported by a common mission, a shared education design and curriculum, world- class technology and a talented headquarters team in New York City. Through this effort, Avenues is helping to define a new category of school—a world school.

What is a world school? Begin by thinking Avenues New York, Avenues São Paulo, Avenues London, Avenues Shanghai, Avenues Silicon Valley and Avenues Dubai.

Think of Avenues as one school with many campuses that are located across the globe and are intentionally connected and interdependent. It will not be a collection of different schools, each pursuing different educational strategies, but rather one highly-integrated “learning community,” supported by a common vision, a shared curriculum, collective professional development of its faculty and the wonders of modern technology.

Avenues New York opened in 2012 and is a 15-grade independent school located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Avenues’ global vision – one school with many interconnected and interdependent campuses – begins with the cultivation of innovative thinkers, creative problem solvers and responsible global citizens here in New York.

In August 2018, Avenues will open its second campus in São Paulo, Brazil, enabling new kinds of exchange between two leading centers of culture and commerce in the Americas.

About SAGE (Strategic Alliance of Global Educators) SAGE (Strategic Alliance of Global Educators) unites top forward looking and innovative schools from around the world with the aim of bringing educators together to form professional networks that allow wider and deeper sharing of pedagogical ideas, resources and best practices. Every two years, a SAGE partner school hosts a conference of school leaders to share and exchange educational resources and expertise on an international platform.

Founding members include Nanyang Girls’ High School (Singapore), the High School Affiliated to Fudan University (Shanghai, China), The Affiliated High School of Peking University (Beijing, China), RDFZ Xishan (Beijing, China), Shanghai No. 3 Girls’ High School (Shanghai, China), Hwa Chong Institution (Singapore), Menlo School (California, USA), School of Science and Technology, Singapore (Singapore), Scotch College Melbourne (Australia) and The Perse School (Cambridge, UK). Further schools have since joined as associate members: Avenues: The World School, Camberwell Girls Grammar School (Australia), Nanshan High School (Taipei) ,Øregård Gymnasium (Denmark), Oulunkylän Yhteiskoulu (Helsinki), and Pathways School Gurgaon (Delhi).

Key Information

LOCATION

The conference will be held at Avenues: The World School, 536 W. 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

Conference meetings will be held on the 5th floor.

CHECK-IN

Conference check-in will be available on Thursday, August 9 from 8:30- 9:00am at Avenues.

Upon check-in, you will be issued a badge that will provide entry into the campus. Please note that due to security reasons, a badge will be required for all conference attendees.

WIFI CONNECTION

Network: Avenues Guest

CONTACT INFORMATION

AVENUES SECURITY DESK +1 (212) 524-9000

MIN KIM Conference Organizer Vice President, People and Culture +1 (646) 625-7616 [email protected]

MEALS

All meals at Avenues will be served in the 5th floor commons

-Wednesday, August 8: Dinner will take place at 5:45PM Location: Bottino, 246 10th Ave.

-Thursday, August 9: Breakfast and lunch will be served at Avenues

-Friday, August 10: Breakfast will be served at Avenues

Schedule of Events

Wednesday, August 8

3:00-3:30pm Check-in for those attending SAGE Strategic Planning Meeting (lobby)

3:30 -5:30pm SAGE: Strategic Planning Meeting (Rm. 503) Moderator: Agnes Ng

5:45 – 7:00pm Welcome Dinner at Bottino (246 10th Ave.)

7:30 – 9:00pm Private Tour of the Whitney Museum (99 Gansevoort St.)

Thursday, August 9 (Morning)

8:30 – 9:00 Check-in (lobby) and Breakfast (5th Floor Commons)

9:00 – 12:00 Can Empathy be Taught?

9:00 - 9:45 Avenues World Elements (Rm. 502) Speaker: Jeff Clark

9:50 - 10:10 Putting Writing into Perspective: Cultivating Empathy through High Intensity Writing Practice (Rm.502) Speaker: Julia Higdon

10:10 - 10:40 Student Leadership and Empathy (Rm. 502) Speaker: Siew Hui Sim-Lim

10:40 - 10:50 Break

10:50 - 12:00 Panel - Importance of Empathy (Rm. 502) Moderator: Tim Carr Panelists: Jenna Arnold, Sophie Menin, Agnes Ng, Jie Zhou, Julia Higdon

12:00 - 1:00 Triad Time and Lunch

Thursday, August 9 (Afternoon)

1:00 - 4:10 Bilingualism, Does It Matter?

1:00 - 2:45 Bilingualism: Controversies, Myths, Misconceptions, and the Real Deal (Rm. 502) Speaker: Alison Mackey

2:45- 3:05 Break

3:05 - 3:50 East meets the West (Chinese Book Project) (Rm. 502) Speakers: Abby Brody, Ying-Wen Chen

3:50 - 4:10 Triad time

4:15 - 5:15 School tour (optional)

Friday, August 10

8:00 - 8:30 Breakfast (5th Floor Commons)

8:30 – How Can Real-World Learning Transform Schools? 12:15pm 8:30 - 9:15 Project-Based Learning: A Constructivist Approach to Transformational Understanding (Rm. 502) Speaker: Jeff Robin

9:15 - 10:00 Session A Group 1: Mastery Academy Showcase (Rm. 504) Speakers: Austin Volz / Tim Carr

Group 2: Mastery Program (Rm. 503) Speaker: Mark Gutkowski

10:00 - 10:15 Break

10:15 - 11:00 Session B Group 1: Mastery Program (Rm. 504) Speaker: Mark Gutkowski

Group 2: Mastery Academy Showcase (Rm. 503) Speakers: Austin Volz / Tim Carr

11:15 - 12:15 Next Transformative Steps Workshop (Rm. 502) Facilitator: Tim Carr

12:15 - 12:30 Closing

Conference Speakers and Panelists

JENNA ARNOLD Jenna Arnold is the co-founder of ORGANIZE, a non-profit focused on ending the waitlist for organ transplants in America. ORGANIZE was awarded an Innovator in Residence position in the Secretary's Office of Health and Human Services and co-hosted the 2016 White House Organ Donation Summit. ORGANIZE won 1st Prize in the Verizon Powerful Answers Award and the Inaugural Stanford MedX Health Care Design Award, and received 2016 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award and a Classy Award. Jenna has been named Glamour Women of the Year, Inc. Magazine 35 under 35 and Oprah’s 100 Super Soul Influencers, was named a Young Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum and is Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. She served as the Head of Data and analytics at the Women’s March and is currently working with a series of impact investing funds. Previously, Jenna founded PressPlay, a boutique content creation firm that comes up with cool ways to make people give a sh*t and was the youngest American to work at the United Nations.

ABBY BRODY Abby Brody is an experienced teacher and grade head who was Avenues’ head of third and fourth grades for the past two years before becoming head of Lower School in fall 2014. Before Avenues opened, she spent six months working with the school as a consultant, helping to design the Lower School curriculum. Prior to joining Avenues, she taught at the Allen-Stevenson School from 2003 to 2012, serving as both first grade and third grade head teacher. During that time, she also revamped the math and social studies curriculums for both grades, as well as working with students who were struggling with reading and writing. Abby received a B.S. degree in developmental psychology from Duke University and also received North Carolina teaching certification for kindergarten through sixth grade. She also she received a Master’s of elementary special education from Bank Street College, where she focused on language disorders. She has also spent time traveling with the Shipboard Institute of Education, run by the University of Virginia. During the trips, she wrote curriculum for geography, culture and immigration, circumnavigating the globe. Visiting 18 different countries, she exchanged teaching principles and ideas with classroom teachers in each port visited. Abby also holds leadership positions with a number of charities, founded a private non-profit Hebrew school and has received the Ludwig Jesserson award from the United Jewish Appeal of New York for work with autistic children. Abby grew up in Minnesota but moved when she was 10 to New York City, where she attended the Dalton School.

TIM CARR Having lived in six countries on four continents for a total of 26 years overseas, Tim Carr now happily pursues his intercultural learning quest back in the USA. After several teaching stints, Tim has been fortunate to lead some of the iconic international schools in the world. From 2010-17, he was Head of the Jakarta Intercultural School (JIS), one of the prominent non-profit, truly international schools with a distinctive mission and culture. Prior to Jakarta, dynamic and aspirational schools in Japan, Costa Rica, and Brazil have afforded Tim eclectic settings for the pursuit of contemporary learning. As a leader of schools, public and private, domestic and international, Tim specializes in helping communities to articulate and implement compelling visions in multicultural learning environments. He is interested in the impact of positive psychology and the process of using an organization’s strengths as a foundation for innovation. His recent schools have focused on personalized, experiential learning in which students are encouraged to construct their own meaning and design creative solutions to society’s problems. Tim’s fascination with human beings, both their uniqueness and potential, inspires his desire to create and nurture ideal learning environments. Currently as Director of Research and Development at Avenues, Tim continues his quest to discover keys to unlock learning for all.

YING-WEN CHEN Yingwen Chen originally joined Avenues in fall 2013 as an associate teacher in a Chinese section of kindergarten. In 2014, she became an associate teacher in a Chinese section of second grade and, in 2015, head teacher in a Chinese section of second grade. In fall 2016, she rises to the third grade, where she will become head teacher of a Chinese section in the immersion classes, nursery through grade four, children spend alternate days in a class conducted in English and in a class conducted in either Spanish or Mandarin Chinese. Before coming to Avenues, Yingwen worked as a student teacher at the Hewlett Elementary School and Ogden Elementary School (Hewlett, NY), where she taught English to speakers of other languages in grades two through five. She also served a student teacher at Lower East Side Preparatory High School in New York, where she taught Chinese as a foreign language to a class of 30 students. In that role she developed and implemented lessons with a focus on different topics, including science, cultural studies and social studies, and used instructional technological tools, such as LEGO education robotics, iPads and Smartboards. These previous experiences with second language learners has been valuable to Yingwen in the immersion classes at Avenues. Prior to moving to New York, Yingwen worked as an analyst at the Shanghai (China) Municipal Health Bureau, translating documentation from Spanish into Chinese. She also facilitated meetings with visitors from Spanish-speaking and English-speaking countries. Her first teaching experience was as a volunteer at Dong-Li Fengmei Special School in Shanghai, where she taught students with special needs basic oral English and Chinese literacy skills.

Yingwen has a B.A. in Spanish from Shanghai International Studies University and received an M.S.Ed. in languages other than English (Chinese) and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). She holds a certificate for childhood education from East China Normal University and New York State certification in teaching Mandarin and TESOL (both seven through 12), as well as for kindergarten through six.

MARK GUTKOWSKI Mark joined Avenues in 2015 as the Director of Mastery and is currently responsible for the strategic development, execution and evaluation of this visionary program. An award-winning educator and program designer, recognized by both Princeton University and by the state of New Jersey, Mark consistently challenges the status quo in education. Thematically, his work focuses on empowering student autonomy in the classroom and on transforming traditional power relationships between students and teachers. He received the Avenues Golden Tiger Award in 2018 for his team’s latest endeavor, the Mastery Learning System. Prior to joining Avenues, Mark spent 18 years at Morristown High School, a public high school in New Jersey. While at Morristown, he built a number of innovative programs, including a self-paced environment for studying Latin and also a multi-year academy experience for students interested in interdisciplinary learning. He has worked as a consultant, an instructional leader, and has acted in various capacities as a representative for teachers in New Jersey through the New Jersey Department of Education.

JULIA HIGDON Julia Higdon is passionate about conducting applied research in schools in order to push the boundaries of what we know about learning and human development forward; to better enable students, and the faculty supporting their growth, to be equipped to solve the pressing world problems that we face and will face; and to make advanced, rigorous methods accessible to other researchers in schools around the world. As a Senior Research Scientist on the Research & Development team at Avenues: The World School (http://research.avenues.org), Julia and her team conduct original research on child development and learning, global education, and organizational health, and mentor faculty research fellows in conducting their own original research projects. Julia and her team also develop dashboard-analytic systems to enable rapid insights and long-term monitoring for success at all levels of leadership in the organization.

Julia received her doctorate in education research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and holds Master’s degrees in teaching international education policy. Julia was a classroom teacher at the K-12 and graduate levels before diving into education research, and brings both substantive and technical expertise to her current role at Avenues. Julia is a co-author of Empowering Global Citizens: A World Course, among other publications.

SIEW HUI LIM Lim Siew Hui is the Principal Consultant/Student Development in Hwa Chong Institution, Singapore. She heads and oversees various units under the Student Development (SD) Department, mainly areas under the Character and Citizenship Education (CCE). In her fifteen years of teaching, she had been involved in SD work which includes National Education, CCE curriculum, Values in Action (VIA) which is linked to community engagement, Guidance Education and Leadership Education. She leads and collaborate with her department members in designing and planning various experiential SD programs, to guide and develop students to live with Passion and lead with Compassion.

In addition, a recipient of the Public Service Commission of Singapore Scholarship for teaching service, Siew Hui received a B.Sc. (with Honors) at the National University of Singapore and teaches Mathematics to students of Grades 11 & 12 at the College Section. ALISON MACKEY Alison Mackey is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is also Vice-chair of the Department of Linguistics there. She holds a second appointment as Professor at Lancaster University in the UK where the Department of Linguistics is ranked in the World’s top ten. She is an expert on how second languages are learned and how they might best be taught. She investigates second language learning across the lifespan, specifically how additional languages are learned at different ages, looking at both younger and older children, as well as college age, prime-of-life, and older adults. Her work has been published in all of the top scholarly journals, as well as in edited collections by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, John Benjamins and others. She has published more than 75 articles, chapters, and reports. She has published 16 books in total - four books on researching children’s language learning and teaching. One of these books, with Kendall King, The Bilingual Edge: Why, when and how to teach a child a second language (with HarperCollins) has been translated into multiple other languages and a Chinese edition will appear in 2019. She has held several major research grants, including, for example, from the NSF (US), the ESRC (UK), the Spencer Foundation (US). Her graduate work includes an M.Phil from Cambridge University in the U.K., and a PhD from the University of Sydney in Australia, in linguistics. She has been a language instructor, given workshops for teachers, and taught linguistics in the U.K., Japan, Australia, and the U.S. She is a regular speaker on how languages are learned and taught including multiple academic conferences, as well as to parent and teacher audiences and in the popular media, for example on NPR in the US, and the BBC in the UK, as well as to venues like the World Bank, the US State Department and the Foreign Service Institute. She occasionally writes for the popular press. Her last piece for the Guardian newspaper (UK) was on the brain and L2 learning and went viral, being shared more than 65,000 times on Facebook – more than any other article in that section that year. Her most recent professional successes include winning the Modern Language Association's Mildenburger prize, and being appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge University Press's Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, which is the official journal of the Association for Applied Linguistics, the largest professional organization in the field. She considers one of the most important and rewarding parts of her job to be her 26 graduated PhD students, all in top jobs directing academic or government programs, and training their own students.

SOPHIE MENIN Sophie Menin is a cultural journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Barron’s, The Daily Beast, Wine Spectator, Opera News, and Saveur, among other publications. In March, she attended the Mind & Life Dialogue on “Reimagining Human Flourishing” at the private residence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The dialogue focused on social-emotional learning and how compassion, ethics, and attention training can be more fully integrated into existing educational frameworks. Sophie earned a master's in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU and is the mother of a rising Avenues fifth grader.

AGNES NG Ms. Agnes Ng is the Dean of Relations and Communications of Nanyang Girls' High School. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English Language and a Master of Arts in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore. She was also awarded Distinction for her Postgraduate Diploma in Education by the National Institute of Education, Singapore. A recipient of the Public Service Commission of Singapore Scholarship for teaching service, Ms. Ng started her career as a General Paper teacher in a Junior College and then went on to serve as a National Education Officer in the Ministry of Education, where she received the MOE Service Excellence Award. She is currently teaching Language Arts in Nanyang Girls' High School and heading its Relations and Communications team, which coordinated the formation of the Strategic Alliance of Global Educators (SAGE) and the Strategic Educational Alliance of Southeast Asia. In recognition of her devotion to education, Ms. Ng was awarded the National Day Commendation Medal in 2013.

JEFF ROBIN Jeff Robin taught high school for 27 years. He was a founding faculty member of High Tech High in San Diego and remained an active collaborative Project Based Learning teacher at HTH till 2017. He leads workshops around the world evangelizing PBL from a practitioner's point of view. He is a constructivist believing education in school needs to be like education everywhere else people learn by doing and making. Jeff's message is not to fill out worksheets, follow a canned curriculum or read books about Project Based Learning, he wants the teacher to do something and show it to their students and have the students engage in their own version of that project. This is nothing new. This master and apprentice model that can be expandable to a classroom environment. Jeff shows his own examples and animations how everyone can do authentic PBL in their classrooms.

AUSTIN VOLZ Austin X. Volz is an educator and researcher with an international background in higher education, education research, and program design. Austin’s international experience includes a Fulbright in Germany, teaching in Greece, and five years of research and experiential education implementation in China. As a Visiting Scholar at Fudan University he researched Chinese models of, and motivations for, liberal arts education. His writings have appeared in the Chinese Journal of International Education, Fudan General Education, and Democracy and Education: Collected Perspectives. With a foot both in the worlds of research and program design he is motivated by bridging research and practice. He has studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cornell University, Peking University, Sichuan University, and St. John’s College.

Currently Austin is a Senior Learner Experience Designer on the Research & Development team at Avenues: The World School (http://research.avenues.org). In this role he works at the intersection of strategy, education design, and research to invent new programs and school models. Working from first principles rather than traditional precedent, projects include inventing a new model for high school learning, building assessments for meta-curricular skills, identifying actionable and evidence-based principles of learning, expanding access to global education, and refining the admissions process to more accurately predict future success.

JIE (RYAN) ZHOU ZHOU Jie (Ryan) is an experienced English teacher and grade head of English teaching at Shanghai No.3 Girls’ High School. Since joining the school, he has focused on teaching students of Grade 10 to 12, with a special interest in fostering their language awareness and critical thinking in the course of acquisition. Believing that language is more than a tool for communication or information exchange, he is always trying to inspire his students to explore greater possibilities that languages can bring, such as making sense of different logics, promoting mutual understanding, experiencing new cultures, etc. Over his teaching stint, he has won top prizes in many municipal and nationwide English teaching competitions, delivered speeches at seminars and training sessions on curriculum development, teaching design, assessment etc. His academic endeavor has been published in top scholarly journals and monographs. And with his instruction, his students frequently win awards in all kinds of English proficiency contests. Also, he is an active participant in exchange programs of Shanghai No.3 with global secondary and higher educational institutions including University of Toronto, Darien High School in Connecticut, and Castilleja Girl School in Palo Alto, California. ZHOU received his Bachelor’s degree in English language and literature from China University of International Relations and holds a Master’s degree in English-Chinese translating and interpreting from Peking University.

Conference Attendees

Academy of St. Joseph (New York) Angela Coombs, Head of School [email protected]

Affiliated High School of Peking University (Beijing) Liu Chiang, Assistant to Principal [email protected] Fu Shun Li, Teacher [email protected] Fei Liu, Teacher [email protected] Zheng Wang, Principal [email protected]

Avenues: The World School (New York) Abby Brody [email protected] Bernard Geoxavier, Dean of Students, Grades 6-9 [email protected] Ed Huang, Vice President, Information Systems and Technology [email protected] Kevin Murungi, Director, Global Journeys [email protected] Min Kim, Vice President, People and Culture [email protected] Nancy Shulman, Head of Early Learning Center [email protected] Ted Ogden, Associate Division Head, Middle Grades [email protected] Tim Carr, Director, Research & Development [email protected] Wendy Chang, Director Deans & College Counseling [email protected]

Buckley Country Day School (Roslyn, NY) Colleen Fortuna, Director, Admissions & Financial Aid [email protected] Jean-Marc Juhel, Head of School [email protected] Linda Bernard, Head of Upper School [email protected] Marjorie Jean-Paul, Director, Development & Alumni Relations [email protected] Lynn Sullivan, Director of Diversity and Inclusion [email protected]

Camberwell Girls Grammar School (Victoria, AUS) Eleanor Wood, Head of Science Department [email protected] Karen Lemanis, History and Science Teacher [email protected] Kath Woolcock [email protected] Nicole Rogers, Head of Strategic Initiatives [email protected]

Hwa Chong Institution (Singapore) Siew Hui Lim, Principal Consultant for Student Development [email protected]

Nanshan High School (Taipei) Wen-Ya Tsai, English Teacher [email protected] Ya-Ti Huang, Director of English Department [email protected] Yen-Hong Liu, Director of Foreign Language Center [email protected]

Nanyang Girl's High School (Singapore) Agnes Ng, Dean of Relations and Communications [email protected]

Oulunkylän Yhteiskoulu (Helsinki) Marjo Kurki-Mäkelin, Vice Principal [email protected] Ritta Nevala, Teacher, Home Economics and Healthcare [email protected]

Pathways School Gurgaon (Delhi) Megha Oberoi, Diploma Program Coordinator [email protected] Rohit Bajaj, School Director [email protected]

RDFZ Xishan School (Beijing) Ching Ya Ooi, Assistance Vice Principal [email protected] Jiayin Pu, Vice Principal, Academic [email protected] Ping Yu, Teacher [email protected] Yan Liu, Principal [email protected]

School of Science and Technology (Singapore) Linda Chan, Principal [email protected] Vincent Tan, Vice Principal (Administration) [email protected]

Shanghai No. 3 Girls' High School (Shanghai) Jie Zhou, Teacher [email protected] Ling Qin, Teacher [email protected]

The Perse School (Cambridge) Dan Cross, Senior Deputy Head [email protected]

The Speyer Legacy School (New York) Barbara Tischler, Head of School [email protected]

Woodland Hill Montessori School (New York) Susan Kambrich, Head of School [email protected]