MIT Collaboration to Enhance Our School’s Premier STEAM Program

The Village School has been selected to be part of a new Nord Anglia Education collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This collaboration will enhance our science, technology, engineering, arts and math curriculum and is the perfect complement to our school’s widely-recognized STEAM program.

Dear Parents,

We are excited to share with you that The Village School has been selected to be part of a new Nord Anglia Education collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Village is one of only seven NAE schools in North America and 13 worldwide to be selected for the inaugural year of the program.  This collaboration will enhance our science, technology, engineering, arts and math curriculum and is the perfect complement to our school’s widely-recognized STEAM program.

The new program, which launches in September, will include a series of in-school challenges that focus on the juncture between the five STEAM disciplines, including bioengineering, robotics, and computer coding. Our teachers and students will spend time every year immersed in STEAM workshops with leading academics at the annual Cambridge Science Festival at MIT, providing them with the opportunity to learn directly from lecturers and students at one of the world's leading STEAM institutions. The Village School’s STEAM discipline teachers will also benefit from unique professional development opportunities through annual workshops and ongoing training with MIT staff. Next week several of our teachers will travel to MIT to collaborate with MIT faculty and other teachers from around the world and develop a project to analyze climate change for our students.

As you know Village has long emphasized STEAM education in its overall curriculum, with 67 percent of our 2016 seniors applying to university STEM/STEAM programs. At Village, we recognize that successful STEAM programs require teachers and administrators that are willing to change their traditional approach to teaching and learning. They must encourage lively classroom participation with students debating answers, collaborating on ways to address real-world problems and unabashedly facing failure as a step in the discovery process for a solution. MIT’s philosophy of “Mens et Manus,” “mind and hand,” which calls for a hands-on approach to problem solving ties directly to our Village project-based learning curriculum and is an essential component to a successful STEAM program.

We are truly excited to be an inaugural school and will continue to share more information in the following weeks. 

Best Regards,

Gabriella Rowe, Head of School