Maximizing Learning Opportunities: GDS Lower School Teachers Engage in Innovative Field Experiences

Lower School faculty have started participating in a series of professional field experiences, led by Lower School Coach Sarah Tiamiyu. Several of the excursions have taken teachers to peer schools, including St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, the School within a School (SWS) at Peabody Elementary, Horace Mann, and The Oakwood School.

“I coordinate field experiences not just for students but for teachers,” said Sarah who also works with the Independent School Experiential Education Network. “Visiting other schools helps teachers build networks with fellow educators, share resources, and work through common challenges. And seeing how others teach can spark new ideas, techniques, and strategies they can bring back to their own classrooms.”

Lower School Principal Christy Diefenderfer echoed this vision: “At a high level, we're thinking about how inspiration from other schools can inform and enhance our own practices.”

One of the first trips was to SWS at Peabody Elementary, attended by GDS PK/K faculty. SWS uses a Reggio Emilia-informed approach—a constructivist, child-centered philosophy that emphasizes self-directed, experiential learning in a relationship-driven environment, where the classroom itself is considered the “third teacher.”

While GDS does not plan to fully adopt the Reggio approach, Christy sees valuable aspects of the approach that can help inspire meaningful work in the GDS Lower School curriculum.

 “We are looking at everything through the lens of: ‘What are best practices and what can we use to infuse our curriculum and our way of delivering instruction?’ Reggio is a natural fit with many of the values we already embrace.”

Another enriching field experience was a day trip to nearby St. Andrew’s Episcopal School to explore innovative teaching strategies. St. Andrew’s is home to the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning (CTTL), where faculty research and collaborate with a global network of university researchers to shape curriculum and share findings with educators worldwide. GDS teachers met with the CTTL team, visited classrooms, and exchanged ideas with St. Andrew’s faculty, who were later invited to visit GDS in return. 

“Exploring schools beyond our own can provide valuable insight,” said Sarah. “While GDS offers a wide array of opportunities for students, other schools may specialize in certain programs like STEM, arts integration, or special education, for example. Seeing other successful methods firsthand, along with just being in a new environment, can re-energize teachers and remind them why they love their work.”

Sarah also organized another kind of professional development opportunity: a four-day immersion trip to New York for GDS’s third grade teachers, Todd Carter, Foun Tang, and Charles Edwards. The experience centered around immigration and migration in the city, aligning with the third grade social studies curriculum.

In New York, the teachers partnered with Andy Myers of the Living City Project who guided them through a range of immersive activities, including five-sense observations, drawing to learn, informal interviews, then-and-now photography, heritage food history, neighborhood biography storytelling, and cognitive mapping.

“Andy is a New York historian, and has expertise in experiential learning,” said Todd. "We visited Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, Battery Park, a Jewish bakery and deli, and Chinatown. All which are very much on target with our teaching. He talked about the history of immigration and migration through New York City, and it's just a wealth of connections for us to our curriculum.”

The goal of the experience was not just to deepen their knowledge, but also to enhance the teachers’ ability to bring this knowledge to life in the classroom with meaningful, impactful learning experiences for GDS students. 

“It was a great balance of focusing on key sites like Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, Lower East Side Chinatown and the Tenement Museum,” said Foun. “[W]e went further back in time, learning about New York’s founding as a colony and about the Lenape people, the original inhabitants. We explored the different waves of immigration throughout history rather than just focusing on the Ellis Island part. Like many other cities, there are many layers and waves of immigration and we looked at what that means, how it shaped the community, what they bring with them and how it changes over time.”

Christy shared that they plan to make the field experiences for teachers a regular practice. And Sarah agrees: “We want to maximize every learning opportunity,” said Sarah. “In a globally minded community like GDS, we’d be remiss to stay put.”
 

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