Faculty Blog

How wonderful it was for our school and our students to host the AISNE Middle School Diversity Conference a few Saturdays ago. It provided rich opportunities for our boys to lead,  to follow, to learn, to experience difference and sameness in new ways, to practice being hospitable and to model culturally responsive leadership while putting our own core values into action in practical and relevant ways.

Nineteen schools from across New England sent 300 students and chaperones on a lovely mild November day to Concord to be greeted by a group of twenty plus welcoming Fenn boys, many in …

I recently attended the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.  I was able to take in several informative and useful presentations. I attended an afternoon session titled From Blocks to Social Media:  Boys’ Play Based Composing of Self and Story. The presentation was an examination of case studies of a preschool play model, a high school virtual communication model and college level Role Playing Game model, all intended to help boys construct meaning and establish identity.  The conference itself was quite fascinating – especially to me as …

The one thing a teacher tries to avoid on the first week of school is a chaotic classroom. It is a time of community building, introductions, and an orderly classroom environment--except in my eighth grade social studies classroom. In the second week of classes, my students participate in a chaos simulation where paper airplanes are flying, pencils are being stolen, and boys are getting up on their desks and yelling. Generally the mayhem is loud enough that a colleague will stick their heads in to make sure everything is okay. This is the introduction to our year studying government.

The …