A long time member of the ECFS community, teacher Andy Meyers is taking a year’s leave from Fieldston to pursue a unique opportunity in the teaching world: taking an educational design initiative at The Whittle School.
The Whittle School and Studios is a network of thirty schools that will be built over the next decade, with a mission of designing —from the ground up— schools with progressive teaching at the core of their philosophy.
“The Whittle School ambition is to create a network of schools that will apply the most advanced progressive teaching to produce creative and responsible global citizens who have the capacity to address the world’s most pressing challenges,” Meyers said.
When Meyers was presented with an unexpected opportunity from the leader of the Whittle School to design and mold the direction of this new project, the offer was impossible to pass up.
He’ll serve as the Co-Chair of the Educational Design Team, co-leading a group of twelve other educators from all over the globe in the construction of curricula, establishing school culture, and creating a suitable program and pedagogy for the thirty international schools.
Meyers previously taught at high schools Bergen School and Fieldston, as well as Yale University, Connecticut College, and Columbia University, so this new opportunity is unlike any of his past teaching gigs.
An integral member of Fieldston’s humanities and history programs; Andy Meyers was the Director of the City Semester program and the Interdisciplinary Studies and Experiential Education Coordinator for the past seven years. He also served as the History Department Chair and a College Counselor in the Upper School, and has been heavily involved in many facets of Fieldston life.
Collaborating with some of the smartest innovators in global education, Meyers hopes to implement some of his past experience in progressive education to his new job.
“This is a chance to apply all that I have learned from my students, colleagues and mentors at Fieldston, to help build a new network of schools that provides students with the skills and inspiration. If City Semester was a chance for my colleagues and students to build a mini-school to apply our ideas about what makes for meaningful, challenging and socially responsible learning, then the Whittle School is that opportunity on steroids. I suppose the real attraction is the chance to bring what 30 years of teaching has taught me to a larger world, to try to influence the ongoing debates about what a twenty-first century education should be and to bring a new progressivism to as many students as possible” Meyers said.
Although his absence will be felt this year, Andy Meyers is taking advantage of a rare opportunity to lead a team of educators in building schools from the ground up, and shaping the future of progressive education.
