Torch - Fall 2017

Senior School students collaborate at a Saturday coding hackathon event.

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important role in learning, it is only one among many tools available to promote thinking and understanding. Introducing timely and relevant resources beyond textbooks generates a lot of interest and excitement for our students—especially when those resources reflect their local, immediate experience. In the Junior School, for example, our STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) Coach introduces the Grade 6 students to the City of Toronto’s published biodiversity materials. These texts immerse our girls in the plant and animal life of their own city, making their learning highly engaging, especially as they grapple with the impact of urbanization, pollution, habitat loss and climate change on their non-human neighbours. Students use the biodiversity materials—which narrows in on topics such as butterflies, spiders, mammals and bees—to explore and measure the natural world around them. The value in using authentic documents that require the collection and investigation of real-life evidence lies in their variety, flexibility and immediacy—and, of course, in the essential questions that they generate. What should city planners do to reduce the loss of biodiversity? What is the impact of roads, population density, building design or conservation efforts on the city’s natural life? In exploring these questions, students learn a lot about environmental stewardship and civic responsibility while building a stronger bond with their community.

One question raised by these kinds of learning activities is how students communicate their understanding. To be sure, the classrooms, labs, green spaces and city locales our girls inhabit are not quiet places. They are filled with voices engaged in discussion, debate and, of course, disagreement. Long gone are the days when students learned silently and separately. Even the hallways of Havergal become lively learning spaces as students extend the open-ended conversations begun in class with each other and their teachers. Essential questions and real-world documents require plenty of interaction and discussion. “ While a textbook can play an important role in learning, it is only one among many tools available to promote thinking and understanding.

TABLE OF CONTENTS | FALL 2017 • TORCH 11