Sabot at Stony Point
Richmond, Virginia
Start Date: August 15, 2018
THE OPPORTUNITY
Sabot at Stony Point, a Reggio-inspired preschool through 8th grade school in Richmond, VA, seeks a full-time teacher for its lower school. This new teacher will join a cohesive, committed, and talented team whose members are garnering national attention for their ground-breaking work. In support of our goal of increasing diversity, inclusivity, and equity at Sabot, we strongly encourage candidates of color to apply.
LOWER SCHOOL TEACHER DESCRIPTION
The Lower School Teacher will collaborate with his/her co-teacher, students, and parents to create and sustain a strong learning community. The Lower School Teacher will support an early elementary class covering all curriculum subjects except Physical Education.
Our school’s teaching priorities include:
Social and emotional learning and relationships
Diversity, inclusivity, and equity
Investigative research, inquiry, and collaborative project work
Mathematics, reading, and writing
Representation of thinking in various media
Documentation of learning
Authentic assessment
Metacognitive thinking
APPLICANT REQUIREMENTS
Applicants must:
Hold a bachelor’s degree or better from an accredited college or university or equivalent in pertinent experience
Understand child development
Have a deep interest in students as learners
Be able to clearly communicate verbally and in writing
Be able to collaborate with others in an open way
Be able to work both indoors and outdoors
Upon employment, be able to pass criminal background checks
TO APPLY
Candidates must submit the following materials electronically (one email with separate PDF attachments) to businessoffice@sabotatstonypoint.org with the subject of the email as “Lower School Teacher Application”.
Letter of interest
Resume
Statement of educational philosophy
Contact information for three professional references
This is a full time, benefited position ; salary is commensurate with experience and education. Sabot teaching positions are within 75% of the Virginia Association of Independent Schools’ salary range.
TO APPLY
Candidates must submit the following materials electronically (one email with separate PDF attachments) to businessoffice@sabotatstonypoint.org with the subject of the email as “Lower School Teacher Application”.
Letter of interest
Resume
Statement of educational philosophy
Contact information for three professional references
Sabot, founded as a preschool in 1972, launched lower school and middle school programs in 2006. One of the first schools in the U.S. to adopt the Reggio Emilia Approach (REA), Sabot employs a social constructivist approach throughout the school.
We have small classes (16-18 children) in the lower school and two teachers in each classroom. Our Reggio-inspired, social-constructivist curriculum is inquiry-based and driven in part by the children’s interests. Our approach is also informed by our commitment to social justice and to democracy. We emphasize collaboration and recognize the many and diverse gifts that each child brings to the group.
We nurture the whole child, and focus first and foremost on social and emotional learning and relationships as the necessary foundations for education. We also understand that there is a strong and necessary link between play and learning.
Our math curriculum is the University of Chicago’s standards-based program, Everyday Math, and our literacy curriculum is based on Lucy Calkins’ widely-recognized Reading and Writing Workshops. Study in Science and History emphasizes process skills, and topics emerge from children’s answers to our guided questions. The arts are incorporated into all areas of the curriculum, and children learn to represent their thinking in many media and through many modes of expression.
Our bi-annual Sabot Symposium and semi-annual Open Doors: Visiting Educators Days have attracted over 600 educators from around the U.S. and Canada to observe in our classrooms and collaborate with our faculty and staff. This outreach is one among several means through which we seek to realize our goal to be A Small School for Big Change.
THE SABOT APPROACH
Our approach to teaching and learning is grounded in the Reggio Emilia approach, key elements of which are described below.
Image of the Child
Children are born thinkers and theorists who, from their earliest months, observe and experiment in order to understand their world. Children are naturally curious and creative. They are motivated to acquire knowledge and to seek understanding by developing, testing, and refining theories. We believe that these dispositions, when nurtured and sustained, contribute powerfully to learning and understanding.
Social Constructivism
In order to truly learn and understand, children need to construct knowledge for themselves based on their own reading and sharing of information and data, not simply by absorbing or memorizing knowledge that was once gained by others. Across the curriculum, our students build understanding by examining their existing ideas in light of new experiences and new information, discussing questions, and testing and refining theories in collaboration with other children and adults. It is essential, therefore, that lower school teachers begin by building the community of the class and by teaching children to collaborate on project work.
Inquiry
Our students do not wait for the teacher to provide answers; instead, they ask questions, design investigations, and actively seek answers themselves. Students learn that there is no one resource for answers, but that many tools are useful for exploring problems and finding solutions – and that frequently there is more than one way to solve a problem. As they make observations; collect, analyze, and synthesize information; and draw conclusions, Sabot students develop life-long problem-solving skills that can be applied elsewhere. Our students quickly realize that learning has cycles, not endpoints. Moreover, inquiry-based learning begins where the students are; it allows students to value their previous experience and knowledge and to make use of their multiple ways of learning and understanding.
Metacognition
At Sabot, children learn to think about their thinking. That is, we help them become aware of how their minds work and how they learn best. They learn which means of representation and expression come easily to them and which are more demanding. They discover which cognitive strategies help them do their best work. Our practice has taught us that children who know their own strengths and weaknesses, who are challenged to assess their own work, and who are comfortable asking for help when they need it will be more effective learners. They will also be better able to adapt to new challenges in the future.
Collaboration
In a collaborative environment, children begin to understand their own competencies, both as individual learners and as part of a group. From kindergarten on, Sabot students begin to recognize each other’s unique talents – what Howard Gardner calls the multiple intelligences. They will seek out those with mechanical skills when something is broken, those who can negotiate ably when conflicts arise, and those who love to dream when a big idea is needed. This recognition of themselves and others usually comes without judgment and is rarely competitive.
Students view each other as resources, realizing that what they can accomplish by working in concert far exceeds what they might accomplish individually. A school-wide embrace of individual differences along with an emphasis on the brain’s plasticity and nearly infinite capacity for growth and development allows children to build upon their strengths and address their challenges without pressure and without limit.
The Hundred Languages Studio
Students make their learning visible in the studio (be it the shared studios and materials center, the classroom studios, or simply a studio-inspired mindset). Children can use an infinite variety of media (clay, dance, video, or pen and paper) to represent, analyze, problem-solve, and communicate in what Reggio teachers call “the hundred languages of children”. This process of representing knowledge and learning leads to reflection, and then to further questions, and then to more investigation in an ongoing cycle of inquiry.
Access to the Natural World
Our campus environment provides children with a rare degree of exposure to the natural world, an experience that many children today lack. Time outdoors fosters the genuine curiosity that makes learning meaningful. In fact, observation of the natural world often prompts students to ask the science and social studies questions that drive investigative research: How does water sustain life? How do birds fly? What is the poetry of sound? Who lived on this land before the school came?
The campus and the adjoining Larus Park serve as a laboratory for making observations, asking questions, and planning experiments. The larger communal spaces available for outdoor play allow children to make cross-age connections and provide more opportunities for social interaction, which are especially important for students in smaller classes. Whenever weather permits, we eat lunch outdoors, and recess is always outdoors except in the case of strong storms.
Assessment
We use an approach to assessment that attempts to reduce the focus on letter grades and increase the focus on feedback and improvement. This honors the school’s emphasis on self-awareness and reflection, and on continuing development and lifelong learning. We do not regard “A” level work as a reason to stop working, improving, or thinking. We expect students to acquire knowledge because knowledge is necessary for learning and problem-solving, but it is not the extent of one’s learning. Thus, we assess work to ensure that it meets appropriate benchmarks, but our most important goals for our students are to learn the process of solving complex problems and to develop the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of their own work. As they move through all school grades, students are expected to observe, evaluate, and refine their own work and learning. This process of supporting students in taking increasing responsibility for and ownership of their own learning begins in preschool and continues throughout the lower and middle schools.
Candidates must submit materials electronically to businessoffice@sabotatstonypoint.org with the subject of the email as “Lower School Teacher Application”.
Together, we are empowering exceptional education.