Claudia Maurino: Are there any reasons you’re comfortable sharing about why you left your former school?
Douglas Wine: I always want to work in a place where I can have impact. I think that the reason I’ve chosen education as my career is that it’s an opportunity to have an impact on people’s lives — that’s A. B [is that] my wife is from Massachusetts and moving back to Massachusetts has a certain personal importance.
When I apply for places, I look based on what it is they want to do. The job application asked me to look at data for the school and said, “in your first year, what data points would you seek to improve and how and why?” Very few places would choose that as the introduction to looking at someone. I found that really enticing. The place I was working previously was deathly afraid of looking at data, which I just don’t understand. I think when you have a discussion about data, you look at what you think the data say as well as what they do not say so that you always have that conversation.
CM: What excites you most about Monument Mountain? What do you think the school is doing well?
DW: During the summer we worked with Student Government and said, “We’re gonna help get some things started.” Our belief was that at the end of the month — by the end of September — we would start seeing people creating new activities and opportunities and things for people to do. We were wrong because, two weeks in, we had the tailgate, we have another student who’s trying to do a dance party in the morning, we have the movie night … By the end of the September, I think we’re going to have had five new things happen as opposed to thinking it wasn’t going to happen until October. It’s really exciting to see how quickly people have gathered and become excited and want to create these opportunities and fun for people.
When we talked [with Student Government] we said we’re going to go from trying to get people interested and excited to then managing the excitement, and we’re a little behind on our “how to manage the excitement” meeting, because it happened faster. As someone who likes to come to a school and have impact, the best thing to do is to be able to manage good problems. And students who are trying to be involved in their community and have things going on at a school that are interesting and exciting and relevant to students, that’s a good problem to have. That has been very exciting.
CM: What do you think the school needs to improve? In what directions do we need to go?
DW: Now, start with an understanding that we need a year to study something like this vast-reaching internship program, and CVTE [career/vocational technical education] program with the greenhouse, with early childhood, with auto, with business, with Makerspace. The school committee says “we want to vote on hiring someone this year, study it this year, and we want to move next year,” so it’s sort of a year ahead of where we were. What that does is to start speeding your questions. We have an opportunity to do some dual enrollment classes; we have two science teachers with at least their master’s or a doctorate in science; we have this grant we’re going for for Innovative Pathways, giving students the opportunity to begin to taste parts of careers or college work here. [We need to] meet with BCC [Berkshire Community College] and see how many of those we can begin to create; meet with Mr. Fisher and Mr. Barrett, who are leading both departments and see how we can begin to do that in science and engineering, and how could science and engineering then fit into engineering and auto, or engineering and business, or science and environmental science down in the greenhouse. And we’re three weeks in suddenly asking these questions.
What is exciting is that, in some schools, you think, “Well, we can’t do that; look at the amount of money we have.” Well, we do need a new facility to do some stuff better, but there are just so many pieces here where you just think, “Man if we just tweak this, or if we got these people to work together, look at what we could create.” Yesterday, Mr. Soule and I were out at Project Sprout, at the garden, and [I realized] the environmental science class we could create with students never having to leave less than a quarter of a mile from here! And what they could learn in that process! There’s so much right here, and it’s this opportunity, because of some of the things that have happened really quickly, to be able to unearth that, and it’s really exciting.
CM: What new initiatives or plans are you most excited about pursuing here?
DW: In two or three weeks, students will be providing feedback on every one of their teachers and classes. [We’ll be] giving student perception surveys out of a program called Tripod out of Cambridge so that we can begin to create more reflective practice as teachers and understand what students have, what they need, and what they don’t have; [we’ll be] looking really closely at CVTE and what’s possible — and then all the rest of these things become related. If you’re going to look at more CVTE opportunities, you’re going to look at having longer classes or something with the schedule, because if you’re looking at dual enrollment and going to BCC, you potentially could be in a class that schedules through three Monument Mountain classes here — so this incredible resource that’s right here is prohibitive based on where we are.
The school and district simultaneously are going through this process of working with an organization called the Great Schools Partnership. We have five instructional leagues that are leading discussions in each of the three schools where we’re talking about our instruction, our process, what’s effective, what we know, and we’re looking at what the best people do in order to do so ourselves. A lot of these things are happening at the same time. The tricky thing with the high school is that we’ve had a lot of individual conversations about these issues, but the reality is that a lot of things have to happen at once; you can’t change the schedule — what’s the point — unless you’re looking at how instruction would be impacted, and then [we need to look at] what kind of training we need for instruction if we’re going to change the schedule, and therefore do we have the right classes for the opportunity we need to give, or do we need to change the way our classes run in order to give more opportunity for students? Do we need a couple of new classes for the type of CVTE thing we’re doing?
At a meeting last week, we started looking at the fact that there’s no way to discuss any one topic without looking at the way in which they’re all related to each other. Over the next month or two, we’re going to have to start determining what it is we need to do, where our proper place is to start. Mr. Falkowski, who’s our new assistant principal, has been talking with people about restorative practices. I can say definitely, because I’m old enough, that, when someone does something and you give them a consequence or a punishment, that does not, in any way shape or form, change behavior. There is almost no evidence that that will actually improve behavior.
Restorative practices is based on the belief that learning from that mistake has a much better chance of helping you not make that mistake again and maybe even becoming a better citizen. [Falkowski] has begun the process of working with individual students, sometimes when there’s a conflict, teaching them how to work through that conflict, [using] restorative circles for some of the bigger issues. It’s a sea change. Most schools are not set up to do it; you understand it, and you get it, and you want to do it — psychologically and philosophically — but then when you actually have to do it, sometimes it gets hard. It’s the beginning of the implementation of some of those things.
We’ll be looking at language. The big thing people now call it is implicit bias in the classroom. [There’s] plenty of talk around gender, poverty, ethnicity, et cetera; I spoke with a teacher this morning and she said, “I want someone to come and observe me and see if I talk to all my students with the same expectation.” She had read a book about how, when a male acts up, she will call on him to get him to refocus, [but] when a female acts up, she will silence her. How, then, are you creating the same opportunities? And if you’re not, how do you catch yourself? If our goal is always to be the best school we possibly can be, we have to continue to ask those questions and learn how to do things better.
CM: What does education — from pedagogy to administration to anything else — mean to you? Why is it important? What should it accomplish?
DW: Education is learning how to learn. I could talk to you about 500 ways that works, but that’s it. That’s all I need to say.
