Jen Frickey Archives - Eagle Rock Blog

Summer Break 2018 at Eagle Rock School

It’s not necessarily a ghost town around campus today as the first week of the summer trimester break gets underway, but with three of our students graduating last Friday and our student body departing for their hometowns the following day, it’s quieter here than normal.

Adding to the lack of frenetic activity is the fact that we recently said goodbye to our 2017/2018 cohort of Public Allies Teaching Fellows, although three of them — Tommy McAree (Literature & Literacy), Felicia Walker (Residence Life) and Micah Saugen (Science) — will be returning as second-year fellows for Eagle Rock School trimesters 76 through 78.

We also bid farewell to a handful of veteran staff members, including Jon Anderson, a Human Performance & Outdoor Education Instructional Specialist and2018 Instructional Coach. John has been named instructional coach at Mapleton Expeditionary Learning School of the Arts (MESA) in Thornton, Colo.

(Jon Anderson — top & left — leading his final piece of national work for Eagle Rock ... helping launc Austin’s newest Innovation Academy. Image credit: Michael Soguero.) — (Jon Anderson — top & left — leading his final piece of national work for Eagle Rock … helping launch Austin’s newest Innovation Academy. Image credit: Michael Soguero.)

Jen Frickey headed back to Canada and will be working with Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Jen began her Eagle Rock career as an intern in our Human Performance Center back in 2001 and served in several capacities before becoming our Director of Curriculum in 2012. Meanwhile, we recently had the opportunity to welcome Professional Development Associate Sarah Bertucci as our new Director of Curriculum.

Other staffers departing include Continue reading…

Sarah Bertucci Named Eagle Rock’s Director of Curriculum

Editor’s Note: You might recall earlier this year that we announced Eagle Rock was actively seeking a new Director of Curriculum to replace Jen Frickey. Following months of reviewing cover letters and resumes, as well as a lengthy interview process, we arrived at a candidate who shined throughout the entire process: our own Professional Development Associate Sarah Bertucci. Sarah begins in her new role work this summer — just in time for our 75th trimester (ER 75). Below is some information on Jen and Sarah, as well as an in-depth Q&A with both of these Eagle Rock veterans.

So, let’s start with Jen:

Jen Frickey began her Eagle Rock career as an intern in our Human Performance Center (HPC) during our 25th trimester (ER 25) back in 2001. She was quickly promoted to the Instructional Staff (assigned to the HPC) and became a Lodgepole houseparent the following year, leaving in 2008 to raise two kids in Canada. She returned in 2012 as Director of Curriculum and is and is now returning to Canada to focus on spending more time with her kids.

Eagle Rock: What were your proudest accomplishments in curriculum?

Jen: When I came into the role I took over a strong instructional team based on the work of Jeff Liddle and Michael Soguero, continuing the curriculum in the direction they had taken it with the previous Individualized Learning Plans update. During my time, I worked on getting our practices more aligned, dialed, high-quality, and consistent across the entire instructional team. Continue reading…

Eagle Rock’s ‘School Improvement Project’ Focuses on Common Assessment

Editor’s Note: “Vision 2020” is the name of the strategic planning process adopted five years ago by Eagle Rock’s board of directors. It helps ensure that our long-term goals coincide with what we do on campus on a day-to-day basis. The vision focuses on seven distinct areas — known as domains — that guide our board, administrators, instructors, staff members and students. One of these domains centers on our academic curriculum, focusing on creating a framework for normed common assessments.

In today’s post, Eagle Rock staffers Jen Frickey, director of curriculum, and Jon Anderson, outdoor education instructional specialist and this year’s instructional coach, address and update the work our staff is doing in the domain of academic curriculum.

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Eagle Rock’s ‘School Improvement Project’ Focuses on Common Assessment
By Jen Frickey (Director of Curriculum) & John Anderson (Human Performance & Outdoor Education Instructional Specialist / 2018 Instructional Coach)

This year, the theme for professional development within Eagle Rock School’s instructional realm, is a close scrutiny of our academic curriculum — specifically pinpointing our power standards. At Eagle Rock School, all students must successfully pass power standard classes on each of our 5 Expectations. These include:

Leadership for Justice
Expanding Knowledge Base
Effective Communication
Healthy Life Choices
Engaged Global Citizen

Top of mind for our educators this year are the school’s Enduring Understanding and long-term learning targets for their own professional development. Enduring Understanding — also known as our 10-Year Takeaway — asks teachers to consider what it is that students will remember about their particular class and what they retained a decade from now.

By creating and implementing schoolwide common assessments, instructors can improve teacher capacity, thus enhancing Continue reading…

Searching The Globe for a World Languages Teacher

Do you favor an educational process that backs diverse high school students in their search to discover their gifts and passions and then nurturing those gifts and passions? Does that sound better to you than rote instruction based on standardized tests and curricula?

Do you like the notion of enabling students to explore and examine their lives and the world around them through language and culture? Do you think Spanish and other languages can be taught in cross-curricular experiences that are meaningful to teens that are actively working on reengaging themselves in their own education? Does a boarding school that bases its ”disciplinary action” on relationships and mutual respect resonate with you?

If you answered yes to those questions, consider applying for our latest job opening: World Languages Instructional Specialist.

At Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center (PDC), our instructional specialists work together to develop empowering active-learning opportunities for our students. We care about each other’s success and our student’s experience, and the way we work constantly and consistently leads to innovations that have an impact at our school and beyond.

That means we’re not only committed to our students here at Eagle Rock, but we learn from those experiences in order to Continue reading…

Strategic Plan Update: Curriculum and Instructional Practices Improvement

Editor’s Note: Back in 2013, Eagle Rock’s board of directors embarked on a strategic planning process that resulted in the adoption of a plan titled ‘Vision 2020’ that assures what we do day-to-day reflects the long-term goals that the organization aims to achieve (see News From The Rock: Vision 2020 for an overview of that plan and process). ‘Vision 2020’ includes seven distinct areas of focus (a.k.a. domains) that guide our board, administrators, staff members and students. In today’s blog post, Jen Frickey offers an update on our third strategic domain — Academic Curriculum.

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By Jen Frickey, Director of Curriculum

Here at Eagle Rock, we intentionally place a significant amount of energy into graduating students who have the desire — and are prepared — to make a difference in the world. We implement effective and engaging practices that foster each students’ unique potential and these help young people use their minds well. To support this, we are working on improving our approach to assessment at Eagle Rock so there is more consistency in assessing what we value across all classes.

As we continue to improve our curriculum and instructional practices, it is important to us that we are challenging our students and delivering quality instruction across all classes and other learning experiences at Eagle Rock. For that reason, we are focusing a portion of our strategic work around creating a framework for normed common formative and summative assessments.

Our aim is that 50 percent of our assessment practices will be normed and shared across classrooms and disciplines by Continue reading…

World Class Instructors Visit Eagle Rock for Explore Week

Did you know that throughout recorded history, humans have had an attraction and affinity for gemstones? People from kings, pharaohs, monarchs, and businessmen, to artisans, shamans, scientists, and commoners have honored the power of the stones and worked with them for various personal and spiritual purposes.

That’s just one of the many topics Eagle Rock School students learned about at the end of October during the latest installment of Eagle Rock Explore Week. Students had a chance to discover a variety of topics related to hobbies, music, art, sporting and outdoor activities and other pursuits intended to enrich our community and better their lives.

EagleRockExploreWeek2

The weeklong learning options had the added benefit of offering a slight break for many of our Instructional Specialists, so they can prepare for the rest of the trimester, while enabling students to pick up knowledge they’ve self-selected as being beneficial to the future.

We have listed the titles of some of these opportunities below, along with the name or names of the instructors involved: Continue reading…

Explore Week Adds New Meaning to the Term ‘Alternative Education’

Jimmy_Frickey This week at Eagle Rock School, we find ourselves once again immersed in Explore Week, a thrice annual offering of lectures, classroom experiences and events that have little to do with credits or curriculum leading to a high school diploma, and everything to do with engaging students in their own education.

This special week enables Eagle Rock School students the opportunity to look at different job choices, hobbies, art and music, trending exercise regimens and outdoor activities they may have never experienced in the past.

So, instead of wondering if you’d maybe like to take up rock climbing as a pastime, Explore Week gets you past the “future planning stage” and onto the mountainside, learning the ropes and helping each other reach the peak.

Explore Week is also an opportunity during this — an intentional week on the School’s schedule — for many of our instructors to catch up on future schoolwork. Meanwhile, students explore alternative learning options, with many of the instructors coming from outside the Eagle Rock faculty family.

Below is an offering of this week’s “classroom” opportunities that already have students doing everything from writing songs to creating their own robot:

Robotics
Instructors: Jacob Guggenheim and Daniela DiGiamcomo

Students in this Explore Week course create their own robot under the watchful eyes of MIT Engineer Jacob Guggenheim and University of Colorado Boulder Learning Scientist Daniela DiGiamcomo. Here, students are exploring the fascinating field of engineering by learning how to program and going on visits with local design experts. Taking a deep dive into the life cycle of design and iteration, they are constructing robots and navigating them through mazes and challenges that the class created and will showcase for the final day’s presentations.

About the Instructors: Jacob is a first year masters student in mechanical engineering at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He originally became interested in engineering — and robotics in particular — when he joined his high school’s first robotics team. What really hooked Jacob into robotics was the ability to take a problem (how to kick a soccer ball) and build something that could do it. During college he sought out projects and research that would continue to allow him to tinker and play with new systems. Today he applies this same mindset —though backed with a significant amount of math and theory — to automating single cell micromanipulation.

Daniela is a third year doctoral candidate in educational psychology and learning sciences and ethnic studies. She is working as a research assistant for the MacArthur Foundation’s Connected Learning Research Network as well as for the Ford Foundation’s “More and Better Learning Time” national initiatives. Daniela is a graduate instructor for Continue reading…

Eagle Rock Instructors Work Together on Formative Assessment

JanetJohnsonJenFrickey By Janet Johnson and Jen Frickey

Each year, our school’s instructional team fine-tunes its collective classroom practice by learning together. Instructors submit ideas for possible topics of study and the director of curriculum, in conjunction with our Professional Development Critical Friends Group, chooses an area of focus for the year.

The Critical Friends Group then meets weekly to plan for four instructional meetings each trimester. The members of the group — both instructional specialists and Eagle Rock Public Allies fellows who are seeking Colorado state teaching licensure — volunteer to study an annual theme, design and deliver engaging adult learning, and facilitate our weekly planning meetings.

A hallmark of these meetings is using School Reform Initiative protocols to share our instructional meeting plans and get feedback about them. We commonly use The Charrette Protocol (note: link opens a PDF) and Tuning Protocols (note: link opens a PDF) to examine our works in progress. These protocols — as well as those that help us to learn from texts, investigate teaching, learning and assessment, and examine student work — are often the backbone of our instructional meetings.

This year’s annual theme is Formative Assessment. For assessment to be formative, teachers and students must ask themselves where they are going, have a realistic appraisal of where they are now, and make a plan together for how to get there. These questions are central to our formative assessment approach.

We attempt to develop our skills in four distinct areas:

Communicate learning targets and criteria for success
Provide effective feedback
Foster strategic questioning among students and teachers
Promote self-assessment and goal setting

Formative assessment is student centered and transparent, with students and teachers working together to set learning objectives and collect evidence of meeting goals. The explicit result, of course, is improving student achievement.

Since the Critical Friends Group had varying levels of understanding and experience with formative assessment, we decided to ground our work together using two texts: Continue reading…

Meet The Teachers Who Made An Impact On Eagle Rock’s Teachers

Eagle_Rock_Blog_Shields Almost without exception, everyone who has ever stepped foot inside a school classroom — and that’s pretty much all of us — can name at least one teacher who became a positive force in their lives.

It could have been an instructor who inspired them to pursue a seemingly impossible career, or maybe helped them discover hidden talents they didn’t know they possessed. Someone who impressed them enough to tweak their thought process and introduce them to new way of acting or thinking, or who went above and beyond in encouraging and informing their interest in a particular topic or path.

A good example of this would certainly not be the relationship between Ralphie and Miss Shields in the 1983 holiday movie classic, A Christmas Story. In that cult film, Ralphie’s goal wasn’t to absorb knowledge or gain insight into a career.

Nope. Ralphie’s sole intent in giving his teacher a fruit basket was to receive an “A” on his paper espousing the wonderfulness of the coveted Red Ryder BB rifle. Instead, he receives a “C+” stamped across the top of the paper, along with the admonition that “you’ll shoot your eye out.”

And while that teacher-student experience most certainly affected the rest of his life, inspirational is not a good term to describe it.

However, most of us do recall a teacher who made a difference, so we’ve asked a few of our own instructors and staff here at Eagle Rock to think back to a time when an educator had an impact on their lives.

Here’s are some of the responses we received:

Meghan Tokunaga-Scanlon, Music Instructor

At Greeley Central High School in Greeley, Colorado, my senior year choir director, Jeremy Francisco was brand new to the school and helped inspire and cultivate my decision to become a music educator. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life until Francisco gave me a lot of responsibilities within the choir and pushed me to try new styles of music. I’ll always be grateful for the experiences he gave me.

Dan Hoffman, Literature & Literacy Instructor

At the Lab School in Chicago, Illinois, Chris Randle, my academic tutor, read poetry with me in between bouts of Continue reading…

Meet The Team: Eagle Rock’s Director of Curriculum, Jen Frickey

It was back in 2001 when Jen Frickey first made the trek down here to Colorado — and eventually Eagle Rock — from her home in Canada. She was barely unpacked before she got right to work, serving as an intern in our Human Performance Center (HPC) as well as a Ponderosa houseparent.

Jen was later promoted to instructional specialist for the HPC and transferred her newly acquired house-parenting skills to a stint at Lodgepole. Then she left us in 2008 to return to Canada.

In the ensuing years, Jen and her husband, Jimmy, worked at Family & Children’s Services of Renfrew County (Pembroke, Ontario). After helping that organization investigate and create alternative high school options for teens in their care, Jen spent another two years coordinating its education and training foster parents. She says she had the opportunity to “take advantage of the Canadian health care system” and enjoy some time off when each of her children were born.

Jen’s back at her Eagle Rock home now, and we thought we’d catch everybody up on her current happenings:

Eagle Rock: What do you do here at Eagle Rock?

Jen: As director of curriculum, I get to work with the leadership team and oversee the learning experience of our students. I work with the instructional team to develop innovative and engaging learning opportunities, and critically examine how our curriculum aligns with the five expectations. In my work, I strive to ensure that we’re graduating empowered and energized young people ready to make a difference in the world. I love that my job gives me the opportunity to work with both staff and students who are passionate about creating change.

Eagle Rock: Where did you receive your education?

Jen: I earned my master’s degree in educational leadership through Walden University in 2006, and did most of my previous studies through Queen’s University (Canada) where I received my B.Ed, B.P.H.E and B.A in 2000.

Eagle Rock: What attracted you to Eagle Rock?

Jen: After leading wilderness trips in Canada, I wanted to go into teaching, but I also wanted the deeper connection and meaningful interactions that outdoor experiences with teens offered. After I received my teaching degree, I came out to Colorado to get some ideas from schools in Denver. A subsequent two-hour tour of Eagle Rock turned into a two-day visit, which turned into eight years of working at Eagle Rock! I fell in love with the fact that every member of the community was choosing to be here. I respected that Honda had made this commitment to American society with local implications and national goals. It was really the conversations that made me want to be a part of a community that valued learning in a diversity of ways, growth for both staff and students, and a school that explicitly saw its role in creating a Continue reading…