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Tips for a Successful Interview and Tour

Most independent and private schools require a visit and an interview as part of the application process. It’s not only an opportunity for the school to get to know the applicant and the family, but it’s also an opportunity for the family to experience firsthand the school’s culture and to ask questions that are not easily answered by a brochure or webpage. Below are some of the most frequently asked questions about the interview process.

When should we schedule an interview and visit?

Generally, visits and interviews can be scheduled in the fall and up until the application deadline. Since each school might have a slightly different way of handling visits and interviews, start by visiting each school’s website.

Unless one of your schools requires an application to be submitted before visiting, scheduling a visit and interview before you submit your materials allows you to get a feel for the school and learn more about it before answering application questions.

How should we dress?

Dress presentably but comfortably. Resist the temptation to overdress; use the student dress code to guide you on how to dress. Remember to wear comfortable shoes if there is a working tour.

What types of questions will be asked during the interview?

We realize that many students have never been interviewed, and we try to make the experience meaningful and relaxing for them. Most schools will use this time to get to know your child and see if the child is a good fit with the school. There are no trick questions or wrong answers, and often, the “interview” becomes a spontaneous conversation and an exchange of ideas and interests. Try not to answer with just a “yes” or “no.” Expand on your answers. We always remind our applicants to relax and be themselves! We want to know the real student, not who you think we want you to be.

What should we expect?

Think of the visit and interview as an opportunity to connect and get to know one another authentically. Students should be ready to talk about themselves so we can understand their interests. They may feel uncomfortable by the attention, and it is normal for them to feel this way. The admissions officers will ask questions, but you have the opportunity to ask questions, too, so have some questions prepared so we can address your needs and concerns. Remember that most schools conduct separate interviews for the students and the parent/guardian.

How should we prepare?

Before the interview, talk to your child about what will happen; for example, there might be a separate interview for the student and parent/guardian. Remind your child to practice good manners and establish eye contact. Research the school’s website to gain insights into the school’s programs, offerings, mission, and core values. Although your child may feel anxious, encourage them to have a good night’s sleep and a full breakfast.

What types of questions should we ask during the interview and visit?

This is a positive experience where you can explore the various opportunities available to your child. At the end of the visit, you should feel that you know the school and that the school knows you.

• Dig deep. Try not to ask questions that you can easily find on the website. It’s an excellent opportunity to discuss the school’s philosophy and mission.

• Ask about the small but important details. How early can a child be dropped off? How does transportation work? What is the food like?

• Make a list of aspects of the school that are important to you and ask about those things

• Ask about the school’s expectations of parents/guardians, which may differ from day to boarding school.

Math, Movement, and Mirth: Students Tackle Real-World Problems

Stacey Tomkiel, Chair of the Middle School Math Department

One of my goals as a math teacher is to show students that the concepts and skills we’re studying have practical, real-world applications. To accomplish this, I’ve devised several activities that give students the chance to get out of the classroom, move from place to place, and interact with their peers – in short, to have fun as they learn.

During “The Amazing Math Race,” for instance, an exercise based on the popular adventure-reality TV show, I break up my eighth-grade algebra students into groups and give each group a passport book and a math problem involving quadratics.

• After each group solves the problem, they glue the solution into their group’s passport and get a clue about who will give them the next problem: “She greets visitors to the school.”

• The students rush to the lobby of Nicholson Hall, where School Receptionist Kim Miles gives them a second problem. After solving it, they paste their solution into the passport and receive another clue: “He runs Big Tech on campus.”

• The students sprint to the basement of the Roberts Center, where Director of Technology Dan Bateson gives them another problem. After finding the solution and pasting it into their passport, they race back to the classroom to solve one final problem, paste it into their passport, and give it to me for my final inspection.

• The first team to return the passport with all the problems solved correctly wins the Amazing Math Race. Whew!

I’ve also designed two similar activities for students studying the concepts of ratios, angles, and slopes, and the processes of measurement, plotting points, and making tables.

• Tall Tale

How can we use angles and ratios to determine the size of an object that we can’t measure directly? On a sunny winter day when the angle of the sun is low in the sky and the shadows are long, my students grab some tape measures and head outdoors to a tall lamppost on campus.

I ask the students, “How can we figure out the height of this lamppost even though it’s too high to measure by hand?” After a brief discussion, the students figure out for themselves how to solve this problem.

With the help of a partner, they each measure their own height as well as the length of their shadow on the ground. By comparing these two measurements, they’re able to determine the ratio between their own heights and the length of the shadow their bodies cast. Then, by measuring the length of the shadow of the lamppost, they can use that ratio to determine its height.

• Stairing Contest

After providing students with the angles of slope mandated for staircases by the state construction code, I send them out in small groups to measure the slopes of several staircases around campus to determine whether they comply with the code.

By finding the vertical height of the staircase and its horizontal length (the distance traversed in climbing it), students can calculate the angle of its slope.

When all the students have measured and recorded their data, they return to the classroom to compare their results with those of other groups. This project provides students with the opportunity to apply their previous knowledge of angles and ratios to a new situation, and to communicate with their peers to accomplish a task and discuss the outcomes.

I hope these real-world math adventures will enable students, not only to understand mathematical concepts and processes more fully but to appreciate their practicality and to relish their pleasures.

Sketchbooks Immerse Students in Literature

Beth Repp, Middle School English Teacher

Approaching a novel for the first time can be daunting for students. What is the plot? Who are the main characters? How can I make sense of this? One of the most effective ways to help students engage deeply in a work of fiction and derive their own personal meaning from it, is to have each student create a literary sketchbook for each novel they read.

What’s a Literary Sketchbook?

A literary sketchbook is like a scrapbook, a repository of meaning. It’s a place where the worlds of literature, poetry, and art meet and are explored creatively and thoughtfully. As students read and ponder a novel and its setting, characters, themes, and motifs, they find and create a variety of visual and verbal components that reflect their own responses to the work.

Students then carefully select and arrange these varied items in a notebook or scrapbook in an organized, intentional way to create a mosaic of meaning, an anthology of their own learning.

Because the books are assembled by hand and not on a computer, students experience the authenticity and pleasure of artists and craftspeople as they savor the direct brain-to-fingers connection. Many students carry the books wherever they go so they can add a sudden insight or reflection at any time.

The verbal items in a sketchbook might include:

• information that helps students better understand the novel, such as chapter questions, character profiles, outlines, quotations, plot summaries, and lists of themes, scenes or conflicts

• their own personal reflections on the novel, such as short essays, poems, observations and accounts of related events or memories from their own lives

• relevant passages or quotations from other literary works

The visual items might include:

• their own drawings, maps, graphs and diagrams featuring arrows, dotted lines, and web-like filaments of connection

• photos, illustrations and graphics from magazines, newspapers and other publications

• collages blending their own illustrations with those from other sources

What Does an Actual Literary Sketchbook Look Like?

These items from one student’s literary sketchbook for “To Kill a Mockingbird” suggest the range of subjects, media, and approaches students display in their books:

• a schematic map depicting the novel’s setting, literary techniques, language, and narrative structure

• descriptions of the main characters, along with photographs of the actors who played them in the film version of the novel

• a drawing of Boo Radley’s oak tree and a list of items hidden there

• a page describing the fears of the children and the student’s own childhood fears as well

• a spiderweb chart depicting the ideas exchanged among students during their class discussion of the novel

• several pages devoted to the main themes, such as prejudice, courage, violence, loneliness

• poems by the student, each written from the perspective of a different character

• a mind map about the story’s villain, Robert E. Ewell

• an imagined dialog between Scout and Boo Radley fifteen years after the events of the novel

• a collage of images associated with Boo Radley, including a whimsical cartoon ghost shouting “Boo!”

How Do You Assess the Quality of Each Student’s Sketchbook?

Assessing creative work is subjective, so I approach the evaluation process in a thoughtful and systematic way. I give critical and reflective feedback to each student on the items gathered and presented for the literary sketchbook. These include content, depth and detail, balance of verbal and visual elements, and the care and creativity shown in arranging the materials.

I hope to find in the sketchbooks evidence of a student’s deep investment and ownership. It’s easy to tell, for instance, how much time a student has spent searching for the “right” picture or photograph that perfectly captures the moment in the text.

The literary sketchbooks are works in progress, and by the end of the school year, students can flip through the pages and see a thoughtful and meaningful representation of their growth and the joy they’ve experienced through literature.

Miracles in the Marshes: Students Find Their Place in Science

Graham Hegeman, Upper School Science Teacher

My overall goal as a teacher is to provide all my students with the opportunity to find a place for themselves in the world of science. Even if they don’t think of science as “their thing” or plan a career in science, I hope they can still savor the experience of thinking and feeling like scientists.

By introducing students to the scientific method of collecting and analyzing data and forming hypotheses, I seek to develop keen powers of observation, analysis, and thinking that will help them to understand and solve challenging problems in any field.

Claiming Ownership

In many science classes, students perform laboratory experiments by trudging through a step-by-step process similar to following a recipe in cooking. Instead, I provide students with a vast amount of raw data and allow them to decide for themselves how to sort it and measure it, and then generate their own questions and experiments based on their observations.

In my ninth-grade environmental science course, for instance, I give each small group of students 20 to 30 preserved stickleback fish along with some information about the bodies of water where the fish lived.

The students decide as a class what characteristics they think might be relevant – from the weights of the fish to their lengths to the sizes of their tails, fins, and eyes – and then try to correlate their observations with the fishes’ habitats. They discover, for instance, that fish with big eyes feed on plankton, which is small and hard to see, while fish with smaller eyes feed on more easily spotted worms. Thus, eye size correlates with food availability in the water where they live.

Fields of Interest

Students also engage in data collection and analysis when they visit the wetlands along the Farmington River in nearby Bloomfield to perform soil analysis, species assays, and water testing and then discuss whether this environment should be protected from commercial development. This hands-on, in-person immersion in such an environment makes science more authentic and immediate for the students. And it’s also a lot of fun!

Similarly, at the outset of my marine biology class, I ask students what aspects of the underwater world most fascinate them and then structure the course around their interests. If they’re curious, for instance, about coral bleaching, sharks, trout native to Connecticut, or the nature of life under the Arctic ice sheets, those are the topics we pursue.

This kind of self-directed study allows students to become scientists instead of recipe followers.

Science Meets Real-World Issues

In my Advanced Placement Environmental Science class, students themselves identify and answer wider questions involving the intersection of science, economics, politics, and ethics. Their case studies have included the reasons for the Great Texas Blackout of 2021, the pollution caused by oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest, and the viability of carbon capture as a solution to climate change.

In one case study, they explored the increasing number of algae blooms and fish kills in the estuaries of eastern North Carolina. Biologists have attributed this phenomenon to Pfiesteria, a microorganism traced to excess nitrogen waste flowing into the rivers from the many hog farms in the region.

Students examined a vast array of opinions on the issue – from scientists, fishermen, farmers, environmentalists, politicians, and journalists. Then, in Harkness discussions, the students addressed the larger question of balancing the competing interests of all stakeholders and what societal values should shape public policy.

A Spirit of Inquiry

In each of my science classes, I want my students to feel that science is open to each of them and that it’s something they can see and do for themselves. In all their learning, I hope they become scientists – gathering data, assessing evidence, reaching conclusions – and, most of all, developing a life-long spirit of inquiry.

Training a Young Artist’s Observant Eye

Katie Burnett, Chair of the Upper School Visual Arts Department

Look around. Pay attention. Notice the details. Seek out the beauty in the world around you.

These are the skills of keen observation I try to nurture in my studio art classes. By engaging students in a wide variety of experiences and explorations, I challenge them to stop, take a breath, and examine the details in their environment intensely – its colors, shapes, contours, tones, and textures.

Today’s electronic media – cell phones, computers, television – continually bombard young people with synthetic, commercial, and coercive images that distract them from authentic and direct experiences with their actual physical surroundings.

Instead, I encourage each student to immerse themself in their own unique universe – in its details, subtleties, and complexities – to see, in the words of the poet William Blake, “a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower . . . to hold infinity in the palm of your hand.”

I’ve created a wide variety of projects and exercises to empower students not only to explore their surroundings but also to create their own personal interpretations of them and discover something about themselves:

• Beauty Hunting – To encourage students to pay attention to their everyday experiences, I challenge them to find seven things they see, touch, hear, smell or taste in a single day that light a spark in them. Then they return to the classroom to discuss these experiences and their meaning.

• Photo Hour – I ask students to take a photo of where they are once every hour for an entire day, no matter how mundane their location is. This encourages students to notice their surroundings, whether a maple tree or a piece of litter on the ground. Sometimes litter can fall into interesting shapes!

• Color Match – I’ll sometimes give my painting students swatches of 20 different colors and ask them to find an object on campus that exactly matches each color. This challenges them to search areas of campus they’ve never visited and to see objects they might never have noticed.

• Buddha Board – A Buddha Board is a small gray board with a special surface. When students paint on the board with a brush dipped in water, the images they create last only for two or three minutes until they slowly disappear. This experience of creating something ephemeral reminds students that art is a process, not a product, and encourages students to appreciate what’s present in the moment.

• Journey Mapping – I ask students to draw a map of their geographical journey to the art studio that day – from home to campus to classes to lunch to sports. The composite images of the paths they’ve taken not only place them in the world physically but also create an abstract image of their daily lives.

• ’Pen’tathlon – Did you know that a Bic ballpoint pen contains enough ink to write a line three miles long? I give students a Bic pen and challenge them to empty it in one week by writing or drawing in a notebook. This underscores the merging of verbal and visual creativity and the joy of whimsical improvisation.

All these exercises inspire students to view their entire environment as a work of art, enabling them to appreciate the richness and transience of the seen environment and to develop the sharp and discerning eye of artistic observation. This enables them to approach the making of their own art with awareness, sensitivity, creativity, and joy.

STUDENTS THRIVE BEST WHEN THEY KNOW THEIR LEARNING STYLES

Jackie Rubin, Director of Academic Skills

When psychologists began assessing human intelligence a century ago, their measurements were based largely on an individual’s verbal and mathematical abilities. During the past two decades, however, researchers have determined that there are in fact at least eight different types of intelligence:

• Linguistic–Verbal

• Logical–Mathematical

• Spatial–Visual

• Body–Kinesthetic

• Musical Intelligence

• Interpersonal–Social

• Intrapersonal–Self

• Naturalist-Scientific

The discovery that there are many different ways of being smart has been profoundly helpful to teachers as they seek to engage and motivate students. While instructional methods have traditionally been geared largely to students with linguistic and logical intelligence, teachers have devised new lessons, experiences and activities to stimulate and nurture children with many different types intelligence.

When I first meet seventh-graders in my Life Skills class, I ask them to name three things they know they’re good at. Their responses might range from soccer (Body–Kinesthetic Intelligence) to chess (Logical–Mathematical Intelligence) to singing (Musical Intelligence). Identifying these areas of success and enjoyment not only boosts children’s self-confidence and sense of achievement, but it also helps teachers determine what types of educational approaches will be most productive for each student.

Another helpful way to determine how students learn best is to figure out their preferred learning styles. While some students exhibit a strong preference for one learning style, most exhibit substantial abilities in two or more. The key goal is not to categorize students but to encourage each student to ask, “Who am I as a learner, and how do I learn best?” Once students know how they absorb, process and retain information, they can take control of their own learning.

• Analytical Learners learn best by reading and writing. They like to organize information in a structured way by taking notes, underlining key phrases in a text, and making outlines. Analytical learners do best when teachers provide them with plenty of time to read, write, and analyze their ideas.

• Visual Learners learn best when they’re seeing and creating visual images. They thrive when they have opportunities to examine and construct pictures, graphs, maps, charts, diagrams and videos, and they also like to make lists, take notes and doodle. Visual learners do best when teachers supplement words with graphic elements.

• Auditory Learners learn best when they can listen, talk, read aloud, discuss ideas with classmates, and ask questions. They prefer lectures and discussions to reading and writing, and they process information by talking about ideas. Teachers can engage their learning style by posing questions and asking students to repeat information.

• Kinesthetic Learners learn best when they’re experiencing or doing things. They like to touch objects, act things out, and play games that involve moving around the classroom. They enjoy hands-on projects, like science experiments and constructing models, and process information by recreating and practicing.

Even when a teaching method doesn’t match a student’s learning style, the student can adapt. During a lecture, for instance, kinesthetic learners can take notes, raise their hands and ask questions, while visual learners can make diagrams and sketches to illustrate the information being presented. Likewise, while memorizing information, kinesthetic learners can pace back and forth or bounce a tennis ball, auditory learners can teach a concept to their parents, and visual learners can draw charts and pictures or go online to construct quizlets that include images.

By identifying, exercising and blending their preferred learning styles with their various intelligences, students will not only absorb and master information more effectively, but they’ll also enjoy the learning process more fully.