The Quaker Curriculum at Lower School

This is not an exhaustive list of what we do, rather a list of highlights from our school year.

Monthly committee meetings: We meet with at least one teacher from each grade level along with any other interested faculty/staff member once a month. In the past, we have included parent representatives and members from Bethesda Friends Meeting 3-4 times each year. This year we began including those members of our community, along with teachers from Friends Community School, at each of our monthly meetings. Meeting topics range from clerking course (which we feel everyone should attend, not just those who serve as clerks), monthly queries, Experiment with Light, brainstorming goals, and sharing new course material.

Speaking Into the Silence: Every student and classroom teacher attends an interactive course with the Quaker Education Clerks during the first week of school. Special teachers are invited and attend as their schedules allow. This course is a refresher on what Meeting for Worship is, why it is, what our expectations are, and (most importantly) how to speak at meeting if you have a message to share. This is really a discernment course. We teach it by grade level so we can tailor it to the age and experience. We act out a meeting and have audience members share prepared messages and then we all share our thinking about whether the message is “just for me” “already been shared” or “right for meeting.” 

This course includes practical ideas including what sitting at Meeting might look like, what we might do with our arms, our eyes, our breathing... Why we sit facing the center... Why we have "things" in the center and what they mean...

Meeting for Worship: We meet every Tuesday morning for twenty minutes. The first Tuesday of each month we meet as grade levels, the remaining Tuesdays are mixed up in classroom pairs or with three classes in the Meeting House. Our hope is to add meetings for worship on the faculty meeting schedule for the 2017-18 school year.

Quaker History: Over the course of 8 weeks, the entire kindergarten grade (not all at the same time) hears the history of Quakerism at its early start in a storytelling style. They reflect on what a journey is, they paint about it, they use sketch-noting to share their thinking about the story. This culminates in our sharing why hearing this story might be important and what it might mean for us today – we use the 3 Y’s; why is it important to us individually, why is it important for our school community or our friends at BFM, and why might it be important for the world. This year we were inspired to hike up Pendle Hill too so we walked around the field for the laps equivalent to the height of Pendle Hill – it was a lot of laps!

Query Writing: Every classroom beginning in first grade writes the lower school Query for one month of the year. The process is sometimes shared at faculty meetings so that teachers can have the thinking made visible.

A Quaker Book of Wisdom: The third grade purchases a copy of A Quaker Book of Wisdom by Robert Smith for each student. They use the book in their classrooms as a guide – sometimes for reflection, for reading, for connecting to curricular lessons, etc. 

Making Quakerism Visible: The Quaker Education Committee has produced one new poster reflecting our teaching and thinking about testimonies and a couple of new handouts this year to add to our current inventory. 

Testimonies Rock!: The two Quaker Education Clerks lead each class through an interactive course in the winter about the testimonies. In an effort to move beyond the SPICES and to develop learning and growing in a way more connected to the testimonies, this course shares a brief history of testimonies in Quakerism, why we want to move away from the SPICES acronym, and then provides a context and opportunity for the students and teachers to begin to seek out their own personal testimonies. Classes have taken these back and some have blogged about them, some have used them as a point of reference to write a persuasive letter to themselves, some have painted reflections about them, and some have used them to introduce queries. This course involves actual rocks!

QuakerEd Collaborative: Denise Coffin and Susan Bastian (from Friends Community School in College Park) began a group called the QuakerEd Collaborative. This is an open group for all educators at any Mid-Atlantic Quaker schools. With the support of Friends Council on Education (FCE), we held our first annual gathering at Sidwell Friends School. Head of School Bryan Garman gave opening remarks, Drew Smith, Executive Director of FCE, gave the keynote address, and we offered two courses for participants. 

My Quaker Book of Wisdom: This spring one fourth grade class is piloting a new program called My Quaker Book of Wisdom. We plan to launch the entire lower school next fall. Every student is given a blank book to write, draw, insert, etc., items related to their journey at a Quaker School. They might use the book to work on the query writing process or reflections on a particular query, they might use it to note their personal testimony and how they are working towards growth in that area, they might add inserts from their teachers about curriculum connections… It is ultimately up to the students and to the classroom teachers how they will use the book in a given year. The books will be collected at the end of the school year and will be re-distributed when they return in the fall. At the end of the students’ career at LS they will take home their Quaker Book of Wisdom as an artifact or evidence of their growth at LS in their journey at a Quaker School.

We try to frame our Quaker identity in three areas:

1.       Our Faith and Practice (things like MfW, Silence)

2.       Our Curriculum (making sure that we connect ideas of social justice, equality, etc. to Quakerism)

3.       Our Environment (making Quakerism visible on campus)

This informs our work with the faculty and with students. We’re trying to bolster the comfort level of the faculty so that they can take ownership of these ideas and find their own way in. We do believe that this work needs to be explicit – caught not taught isn’t enough.