On Friday, November 10, the entire Parker faculty attended the ISACS (Independent Schools of the Central States) Annual Conference, held this year at the Marriott Marquis in Chicago. In addition to taking part in a variety of sessions, several Parker teachers presented at the conference, which had the theme: “blazing a trail to learning.”  

Parker intentionally planned the Fall Faculty Workshop to coincide with the ISACS conference because the school wanted all faculty to be able to attend. In past years, not every teacher has been able to go, especially because ISACS rotates throughout several Midwest cities. The entire faculty was required to attend this year.

This year’s event included sessions such as “Classroom Makeovers: Hack, Prototype & Design” and “Being Consciously Inclusive: Beyond Unconscious Bias.” Teachers were offered around 100 sessions to sign up for. Kate Tabor, 7th grade English teacher, described the environment as full of “wonderful, interesting presentations.” Around 200 schools were present, all of them independent. Tabor said that this is a key reason ISACS is worthwhile. “It’s nice to be in a room full of independent schools,” Tabor said. “We have a slightly different set of issues than public school — we don’t have to deal with Common Core, there’s no test for us to teach to. Our difficulties are different, and our opportunities are different.”

Tabor was one of the teachers who presented, alongside Middle School Technology Facilitator Steven Files, in a session entitled “Connecting Students & Curriculum Through Design Thinking.” In the program, Tabor and Files told participants about a program they are currently running at Parker in which middle school students thought creatively about how to best use the spaces offered throughout the school. “We had an activity in which we led them through a compressed design-thinking challenge,” Tabor said. “We asked them to create a tool that would make attendance at a conference like ISAACS both pleasurable and useful.”

Librarians Mary Catherine Coleman and Annette Lesak, along with Educational Technology Integration Specialist Sarah Beebe, headed a session entitled “21st Century Libraries: Space and Beyond,” in which the ideology behind the Kovler library renovation took center stage. Coleman said, “We wanted to not just focus on a renovation, but shifting and changing the culture of what a library is.”

Lesak elaborated on some of the ideas included in the session. “We wanted to focus on an empowerment idea for students,” Lesak said. “How are you using the information at your fingertips to do good? One of the tenets of schools that attend conferences like ISACS is to be responsible and changemaking citizens.”

Around 50 people attended their presentation, Coleman said. Beebe noted that it related to the theme “blazing a trail to learning” in that  libraries are “changing and adapting to the needs of the world that we live in.” At Parker, she added, “we’re trying to blaze that trail.”