Teaching and Learning

As Dean of Teaching and Learning, my goal is to ensure that we are all learning together as a community, students and adults. This means engaging with and adapting to the changing world around us. It also means staying true to our core values of inquiry, care, integrity, agency and interconnection.

I was first drawn to UHS as a physics teacher because of its orientation toward student-centered inquiry. Our 9th grade physics classrooms are built around shared tables with whiteboards for student use. There is little infrastructure for - or interest in - long lectures; rather, students are expected to engage in their own investigations in a guided, hands-on way.

Our students routinely surprise me in how they search for meaning and relevance in their coursework. I’ve had the opportunity to visit our 9th grade history course comprising a semester of Mexican history and a semester of non-Western history, our extraordinary English electives such as Literature and Honor, Afrofuturism and The Most Dangerous Book (a class in James Joyce), and advanced literature-based electives in Spanish and Mandarin. Our students work hard to connect to each other, to their teachers, to their source materials, and to the broader world. Such efforts spill over into our thriving affinity spaces and human development curricula. These interconnections form the heart of our school and set us up to make profound and positive change.