August/September 2014 63 COURTESY OF MERRYHILL SCHOOLS add 12th grade in 2015. It plans to grow to 800 students. Basis advertises itself as having a “STEM focused curriculum (that) teaches the liberal arts and sciences in its most pure form.” Its parent company, Basis.ed, began in 1998 and today manages 12 schools. Hadley Ruggles heads the new South Bay school. She moved here from Basis Scottsdale. While Ruggles imported a curriculum and even some teachers, she recognizes that Silicon Valley has a unique spirit. “The opportunities and knowledge base that are here—there are so many resources we can tap into,” says Ruggles. “I’ve lived all over the country, but here people are open to asking questions. The pioneer spirit is ingrained much like the Old West.” That “spirit of inquisitiveness” that Ruggles points to seems a natural fit for the school’s STEM approach, or to use Ruggles’ preferred acronym, STEAM, which is STEM with an arts component. “In our new building, we made the deliberate decision to place fine arts and engineering on the same hallway to identify the intersection of the two,” Ruggles says. “It’s like Apple. The reason they’re successful is that art and engineering are entwined. So here you’ll see a ceramics classroom next to a robotics classroom.” Ruggles echoes Vavken by stressing the importance of application. “We want students to come out encountering interesting real-life problems that promote higher-level thinking,” she says. “Students need to see the relevance of a problem and know different angles of how to approach it.” Ruggles and other educators such as Merryhill School Principal Karen Cooper agree that STEM does not symbolize a dismantling of a traditional knowledge base. Students still need to learn basic facts and procedures. Basis students are expected to graduate with at least six Advanced Placement exams and finish their senior year with an independent research project. Basis still has a traditional breakdown of MERRYHILL SCHOOLS Merryhill School officials say STEM helps their students look at fundamentals differently. classes such as physics or math, but here natural sciences emphasize hands-on lab work such as dissections and using microscopes and lasers. At Merryhill, also in San Jose, Cooper deals with students in kindergarten through fifth grade. Merryhill is part of a larger consortium, the Nobel Learning Communities, which is a national network of more than 180 private schools. “I do get so many questions on this from parents,” says Cooper. “It is a buzzword but if I had to put it into words, STEM is a continuation of the exploration of process. That process is of doing things, thinking and making sense of the world.” TEACHING SOLID BASICS, TEAMWORK The goal at Merryhill is to take a STEM curriculum and train children to be independent problem-solvers. “It is affecting the way we teach,” says Cooper. “Deep down, maybe we’re giving them the same fundamentals, but they’re looking at it ‘OK, STEM for me is like AWESOME FURNITURE but you still need the FOUNDATION.’
South Bay Accent - Aug/Sep 2014
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