As a part of our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, we recognize observances and holidays that center the voices and experiences of historically excluded peoples in the United States. We aim to lift up the words of others who share our commitment to learning, and amplify voices from the disability community.

Learn about the history of Disability Pride Month:  
Disability Pride Month marks the anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26, 1990. This timeline from the National Center for Learning Disabilities marks the key events that predate its passage and mark its evolution.

Recognize Disability Pride Month in Your School and Community: 
Explore lesson plans about ability, history, equity, and inclusion from Disability Equality in Education, a “cross-disability organization led by disabled people who are experts in the fields of inclusive disability education and advocacy.”

Listen to the Voices of People With Disabilities:  
Journalist Cathy Reay writes, “Even with the effort some of us put into telling the world about it, year on year Disability Pride Month tends to pass by largely unnoticed by those outside our community… But when the global disabled community is made up of more than one billion people, why wouldn’t people take it seriously? And why aren't more people talking about it?” ​

​In an online learning environment, connection only happens with intention. When we design Academic Program courses at One Schoolhouse, we center opportunities for connections among students, and between students and teachers. Our hiring process for teachers focuses on candidates’ ability to build connections in an online space, and our design and teaching standards continue to reinforce that work as educators create and refine their courses. We do all this because we understand that fostering strong community ties and personal growth is at the core of independent school education. We built our Academic Program to reflect these values that you–and we–hold dear:

Teacher Presence: Reflecting Attentive and Engaged Teaching
In your schools, teacher engagement is crucial for student success—and it’s also true in our Academic Program. Our teachers are trained to be actively present, providing timely feedback, regular communication, and participating in discussions. This mirrors the personalized attention and supportive feedback that are hallmarks of independent school education. As one AP Environmental Science student shared, “This is one of my favorite classes I've taken throughout my entire school career because of the connection I feel with my classmates and teachers. You can't always find that.”

Communication: Fostering Strong Connections
Strong, open communication is fundamental to building a thriving educational community, a value we deeply respect. Our teachers ensure students feel connected and supported through regular, meaningful interactions. Utilizing tools like email, video meetings, voice comments, and written feedback, our teachers maintain a communicative and caring ethos. As one AP Computer Science Principles student noted, “I was nervous about submitting my AP portfolio and asked [my teacher] to meet with me many times. Each time he helped me so much… He always responds to emails so fast and overall is just great at teaching the APCS content.”

Empathy and Understanding: Prioritizing Social-Emotional Support
We recognize that nurturing the whole student—academically and emotionally—is integral to their success. Our teachers provide the same empathetic, supportive environment that you cultivate in your schools, which is vital for student engagement and performance. One AP Physics C student shared, “The teacher is phenomenal and helped me get back on my feet when I needed help… She went out of her way to reach out to me on several occasions to make sure I was alright and to answer any questions I had, which is something I truly appreciate.”
Personalization: Creating Opportunities to Pursue Individual Interests
We share your commitment to personalized education, understanding that each student’s unique path is crucial to their success. Our Academic Program courses adapt to individual needs and interests, mirroring the tailored educational experiences you provide. Our pedagogy has embraced personalized learning for nearly ten years. As one Neuroscience student mentioned, “The project at the end of the year allowed me to dive deeper and more creatively into a topic that interested me.” 

Student Growth: Delivering High-Quality Feedback
Quality feedback is vital to student growth. Our teachers provide the kind of detailed, constructive feedback that aligns with your high standards, ensuring students are guided effectively. This feedback helps students understand their progress and areas needing improvement, fostering a sense of accomplishment and direction. By using rubrics and providing insightful feedback, our teachers support students in achieving their goals. An AP Biology student wrote, “"My teacher is always willing to help, is quick in responses to emails,... is interested in my pursuits outside of school, and offers great feedback on assignments."

Partnership: A Shared Vision of Student Success
Your values of connection, engagement, and personalized support are at the heart of everything we do. We believe in creating a dynamic, nurturing learning community where students feel supported, engaged, and valued. Through strong relationships and tailored educational experiences, we strive to uphold the very best of independent school education. Together, we can enhance academic performance and foster environments where students thrive.

The thing is, Generative AI isn’t magic. It’s people. Behind every large language model are millions of pages of information, which contain the author’s biases as well as the biases of those who chose what to include and, just as important, what to exclude from the data set. So what are we as academic leaders to do? Do what we do best: be a model. Model for our students and colleagues how to use AI transparently, responsibly and collaboratively.

Transparency: 
Ethan Mollick writes about cyborgs, people who use AI for work, yet refrain from discussing their use of this tool with colleagues. In a 2023 article, Mollick writes, “there are at least three reasons these cyborgs stay secret. But they all boil down to the same thing: people don’t want to get in trouble.” However, when you have a school culture that celebrates new ideas and experimentation, you can have an open discussion about when and where to incorporate AI into your work and when not to. Similarly, teachers who use AI to lesson plan and refuse to pull back the curtain on this process miss out on an opportunity to teach students how to use AI. I recently asked Gemini to “please pretend to be a lipid soluble hormone, specifically testosterone, and write a song in the style of Taylor Swift,  from the perspective of the hormone, describing what happens once you are released (and from where), how you enter the cell, moving through the cell membrane (because you are lipid soluble) and then bind to a receptor protein to affect gene expression.” The song it created was hilarious and memorable, but was it accurate? As I was initially drafting the instructions for the class, I told them not to worry, I had checked the lyrics and they were biologically valid. But then I paused. Had I kept this in the instructions I would have missed an important teachable moment: pressing students to check for accuracy. Instead, I told my students I used AI to write several songs, but we couldn’t trust that what was created was accurate. Checking for accuracy became their job and they jumped right in.  By modeling how I used AI to create the lesson along with sharing possible pitfalls of the tool, I was not only helping students understand signal transduction pathways, I was teaching a transferable skill: approaching AI-generated content with a discerning eye. 

Responsible Use:
The Association of Academic Leaders February AI meetup, hosted by Sarah Hanawald, highlighted advice from Venable, the law firm, on things to consider when crafting your school’s policy when it comes to generative AI (Pass & Sykes, 2024). There are a myriad of issues to address: from student privacy to when and where AI is used. Should there be different standards for use on a document that is generated right before class, solely for a teacher’s use during that period, compared with an article shared on the school website? I would think so, but I’m also not a lawyer. Understanding how a generative AI tool stores and uses the data that users feed into it is important, especially when it comes to concerns about copyright and student privacy. At the Loomis Chaffee AI Conference: Navigating Uncertainty, Embracing Possibility: AI in Independent Schools, one of the presenters shared how he protects student privacy by replacing the names of his students with famous musicians or athletes on work that he uploads and ask AI to evaluate. Sharing hacks like this can be a stop gap for protecting student privacy, but schools need to carve out time to work on these policies as well as educate faculty and staff on how to engage with these policies. Given the pace of change in what is possible with Generative AI, these policies need to be living documents, regularly reviewed for compliance with local laws.

Collaboration:
Given the explosion of generative AI tools, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and like it is impossible to keep up with what is happening in the field. That tsunami of possibilities can drown curiosity courtesy of choice paralysis. How do you even decide which AI tool to use or to team up with? Take advantage of the saying ‘many hands make light work’ by having an AI Discovery committee made up of constituents that represent all aspects of your school community: faculty, students, staff and even current parents and alumni. Ask each member of the committee to focus on one tool or follow one critical thinker in the field and every other week update a launch pad with a “tiny gem” or notable update on this tool. Prior to meeting as a group, members can read over the launch pad to see what fellow members have added. Now this is where you might ask “couldn’t AI just do that for me?” Yup, it sure could. But, I would argue that in this case having the person who vet those sources be someone who understands your school culture and mission matters. 

The current boom in generative AI presents both exciting opportunities and significant challenges for the academic community. As educators, we have a responsibility to embrace transparency, promote responsible use, and foster collaboration within our schools to harness the power of AI while mitigating potential risks (a task that makes lunch duty seem like a breeze!). By modeling critical thinking and open communication, we can empower future generations to navigate this rapidly evolving technological landscape and ensure that AI serves as a tool for learning and progress,  expanding the realm of what is possible in education and promoting critical thinking.

The AP® African American Studies course brings together critical lenses from multiple disciplines and asks students to build a context for college-level academic study. Students will encounter the rich complexities of African societies prior to European encounters and trace the evolution of global diasporic identities and cultural connections through twentieth century independence movements and into the digital present. They will have a chance to investigate the artistic traditions, political strategies, and intellectual trends that have shaped African American representation, conflict, and advancement across regions and eras. Students will use the methods and evaluation tools developed by leading scholars to question data, media, and other sources that capture the Black experience at the intersections of gender, class, sexuality, and ethnic identity. 

In order to face this moment and rise to its challenges, we have to prepare our students. Throughout the last two centuries, Black writers, creators, and thinkers have pointed to the critical importance of African American histories and communities to an understanding of American identity. When we neglect to incorporate these stories and theoretical concepts, or reduce them to where they can be seamlessly integrated into the mainstream, we fail to see how those seams, those complexities, those moments are what constitute the fabric of American democracy, at its weakest and strongest points. The AP® African American Studies course is the preparation our students need to build the competencies that will be required in their futures.

​All of us in the independent school community redoubled our DEIB efforts during and after the summer of 2020. We did the same in the Academic Program at One Schoolhouse. Now, four years in, we can clearly see the results of our efforts. 
One of our core competencies, embedded in each one of our courses, is to expand each student’s worldview. This means honoring identity, building belonging, and providing an accurate perspective of the complexity and diversity in our world. We measure this in our quarterly student surveys. After significant DEIB work with our faculty and in our courses, the number of students who expanded their worldview in an Academic Program course has skyrocketed to 97% this spring, up from 63% at the end of the 2019-2020 school year.

How did we make it happen? We started with our expectations for teachers. During the 2020-2021 school year, the Academic Program asked teachers to identify activities, conversations, and educational experiences that can affirm students’ cultural and racial identities and develop their abilities to connect across cultures.

In Summer 2021, we revised our teacher competencies to reflect our expectations. The Academic Program has two levels of standards for teachers: baseline expectations and exemplary implementations. Our standards were–and still are–clear: creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive courses are a baseline expectation, just like course mapping, assessment, and real-world application are.

Our standards expect teachers to develop identity awareness by examining how their own views, biases, and values influence their teaching. Teachers must understand the roles of marginalization, oppression, Eurocentrism, and bias in their subjects. Courses are required to incorporate diverse perspectives from BIPOC individuals in their historical explanations, analytical frameworks, and discussions of contemporary events. Throughout, teachers are expected to use inclusive language and imagery, ensuring diverse identities were represented in all media used in the course. 

We committed to making every course in the Academic Program at One Schoolhouse inclusive and identity-affirming, and we worked to ensure our course content accurately reflected the diversity and complexity of our students and the world around them. And it made a difference. 

When you make a commitment to change, you also need explicit expectations, coaching, and accountability. We implemented all of these elements. We set clear and measurable standards for our teachers, provided the necessary training and support, and held ourselves accountable to the results. This comprehensive approach has made us better educators. Our courses are more inclusive and enriching, and our students can see the difference.