English teacher Abby Orso observed math, psychology, and English classes this week as she tried to get to as many disciplines as possible during Open Classroom Week. This is her first year teaching at Loomis.  

“I’m looking at classroom management, how teachers create the environment and make it their own, how they interact with students, how I can tweak questions I ask students and what questions I can then follow up with, how to prepare students for the next level since I am teaching freshmen,” she said.  

Abby also hosted visitors to her own class, where she was using the Harkness method. Three other faculty members sat in on part or all of the class.   

Across campus this week, teachers came in and out of their peers’ classrooms. You never know what you might take away.  

“[Open Classroom Week] is a great time for us to get a little inspired because winter is long and hard,” said Caitie Cotton, who had two observers in her College-Level Presidency class. “And I think it bonds the faculty.”  

Abby said she frequently uses the Harkness method, which involves student-led discussions with the teacher as the facilitator. “When I have conversations about why I teach Harkness,” Abby said, “a lot is based on what we can apply outside of the classroom, so being able to pick up on cues when others want to talk, really listening to one another, taking what classmates are saying and figuring out a way to build off each other’s points.”  

When you have 12 to 15 kids in a classroom, Abby said, there is much to be learned from each other “rather than just me talking at them.” While the students talked about Night, the Elie Wiese memoir that recounts his experiences as a Jewish teenager during the Holocaust, Abby took notes, tracking the conversation as a visual representation of the back and forth.  

Rachel Nisselson, the director of the Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching, which heads up Open Classroom Week, sat in on a few English classes.  

“As a modern language teacher, it was fun to nerd out over grammar in some 10th-grade English classes,” Rachel said by email. “In [English teacher] Jo Dexter’s class, I was thrilled to see how excited students were about determining where to place punctuation marks in sentences. Jo added a fun and competitive element to the exercise by challenging students to find, for example, all seven necessary punctuation marks in a particular sentence before going over the answers as a class. I’ve never seen students so exhilarated to identify an introductory adverbial phrase.”  

In another classroom visit, she continued, “I appreciated how [English teacher] Hailey Young encouraged her students to reflect on why Shakespeare played with grammatical structure. The students were surprised to learn that Shakespeare plays often make more sense when read aloud because they were written to be spoken aloud.”  

Teacher Matt Johnson wrote in a message to fellow faculty that as he went in and out of classes this week, he was struck by “how my colleagues are attentive to student learning in the moment, particularly the questions they were asking their students.” Matt is the director of educational and administrative artificial intelligence initiatives and an associate director of the Kravis Center.  

For instance, wrote Matt, in Adnan Rubai’s College-Level Calculus BC class, Adnan “peppered students with questions that both activated prior knowledge to build toward the details of a particular new skill as well as guided them towards a broader conceptual understanding. When a student got bogged down in the details, he asked, ‘Can you generalize that?’ and connected it to bigger-picture approaches to problem-solving. Similarly, while discussing [the novel] Mama Day with his juniors, Dan Dowe followed up student observations in the discussion with questions that guided them toward the details in the text that supported their observations.”   

This year observers have been asked to fill out forms noting what stood out, what was surprising, how something might be applied to their own teaching, and other takeaways.  

As Caitie said, “To get into others’ classrooms to see what they are doing is exciting.”