Buddies
September 15, 2023
A preschool-12 environment offers a unique opportunity to work with families across a student’s entire youth. These are the formative years of life and many students change schools and locations across this time. Simultaneously, students and parents are always looking for peers and mentors to help them through the experience. We all need people to look up to and share notes with.
This week we restarted our Buddies Program with the aim of building these critical connections. Every student got a chance to meet with students from another division to play games, read books, and swap stories. Aside from just having fun, we bring students together so they can remember what it is like to be younger and inspire them to imagine what it will be like to be older. Teaching goes in every direction and teachers emerge as facilitators and hosts of these critical collaborations.
Talking with students across divisions is an essential component of leadership development. We want every student to understand how to express themselves and how to solve problems with their age cohort and people outside of their regular peers. Collaboration requires humility and a recognition that we can learn from anyone. Expression requires speaking in ways that others can hear and problem solving means finding common ground on which to engage a challenge. When buddies get together they flex muscles and deepen habits learned in their regular classroom without explicitly being told that’s happening.
On a more fundamental level, buddies provide the chance to just make new friends and build community across our campus. Seeing teachers connect with new groups of kids on a different edge of our campus and younger students leading high schoolers through rock paper scissors is also just fun. That’s a great excuse to be together.
Clarke Weatherspoon
Head of School