Teaching at Brewster

Introduction

As a prospective faculty member we are excited by your interest in our school. We are excited because we have created a truly professional environment within which you can leverage your strengths and accelerate your growth as an educator. Our capacity to offer such an environment to successful applicants is a function of the unique way our school is designed. It is different – whether in our four-week pre-service training program (Brewster Summer Institute), our curriculum, our innovative use of technology, our merit based career path, or powerful professional growth approach, we are different in ways that get remarkable results for teachers and students.

This document will introduce you to that difference and help you to decide whether Brewster is a good match for your career trajectory. Over the past 12 years Brewster has adopted a highly innovative and successful approach to the pursuit of better learning known as the Brewster Model. In doing so it has become an international leader in secondary education, the subject of numerous features in the popular media, research studies, and books.

A Commitment to Difference

All people share something very fundamental and important in common: They are different! For a school to be successful it must have the genuine capacity to treat people as individuals. As learners, people have different learning style preferences, capacities, prior experience, interests, and knowledge. At Brewster we believe a truly legitimate education must recognize and address learner differences and in doing so add real value to a student's educational experience. To respond to learner differences teachers must be skilled in the ways research has guided us to provide for individual needs. That capacity begins with dedicated artful people and is realized through their development as practitioners skilled in well researched approaches to contemporary practice.

Following are the guiding tenets on which Brewster has built its educational approach:

Tenets

1. Schools exist for teaching and learning. All of the activity of a school should be referenced to this assumption in clear, unambiguous, and demonstrable ways.
2. Education is a true profession. True professions have bodies of professional knowledge and standards of practice for them. True professionals possess the knowledge of best practices in their field and apply that knowledge in practice. Schools employ true professionals.
3. Teachers should demand that learning occurs. Learners should demand high expectations and curriculum and teaching practices that are adapted to their needs.
4. To be successful, schools must be judged by the extent to which they realize their own teaching and learning goals and the standards of the profession. They must be able to demonstrate how their intentions become reality as defined by the growth of their students.
5. Schools are places of creativity and innovation. Schools must possess the best of today's technology, in the broadest possible sense, if we are to truly serve the communities of learners who attend them.

Mission

Brewster Academy, an independent, college preparatory school, provides students with the academic, personal, and social skills necessary for success in a university or college, and for life. The curriculum, delivered using best practice methodologies, aims to maximize retention of skills and content through a collaborative student-centered, mastery-learning program. The Academy, founded on the principle of moral character development, strongly adheres to the long-held belief of educating the whole person, both in mind and body, and does that through a challenging curriculum, rigorous athletic program, and strong commitment to a community living experience that emphasizes service to self and others.

In order to meet our responsibility to assist in this process, we consider the following to be primary objectives of the school's mission:

1. We help our students build self-confidence. Through close faculty-student relationships and individualized attention we focus all the resources of our school on helping our students discover, develop, take pride in, and be recognized for their unique talents and potentials
2. We promote a positive attitude toward learning by supporting a curriculum that meets each student where he or she is and allows each to move at his or her own pace from one level of mastery to the next. Students play an active role in planning and implementing their own educational program.
3. We help our students acquire not only the knowledge and concepts necessary for success in their post secondary education, but also the skills they will need to access, process, and apply information in the future in our rapidly accelerating information age.
4. We help our students develop positive social skills and community values through a coordinated program that includes all aspects of boarding school life. Students learn to function as caring, cooperative, and contributing members of the community who accept the roles and responsibilities of membership and take an active part in building a positive community environment.

At Brewster we also believe mission is not enough—Our school is designed to serve students. Our design begins with policy...

Policy

As part of its curriculum, Brewster Academy is committed to a comprehensive program of personal growth and development that includes all components of boarding school life, (i.e., academics, athletics, community and residential life) and which promotes commitment to learning, respect for diversity, social skills, community values, leadership, and cooperation and mutual support among all members of the Brewster community.

• The Brewster program represents the practical application of the school's mission statement and has evolved from the school's values, learner outcomes (what we want our graduates to know and what we want them to be able to do), and an assessment of current needs.
• The Brewster faculty is encouraged to participate actively in the evolution of the school's mission as defined by the school's values, learner outcomes, and needs assessment.
• The Brewster program is based upon the assumption that all students can and must learn to grow academically and socially in order to become self-sufficient and responsible individuals.
• In order to achieve this goal, students must be active participants in the learning process. Student participation should focus on building independence, community values and leadership, both academic and social.
• The Brewster program is based upon a belief that teamwork comes first in all interactions among students and adults and at all levels within the school. Everyone at Brewster shares responsibility for the growth and development of one another in the community. All members of the community should be active participants in, and share responsibility for, the process.
• The Brewster program provides opportunities for faculty and students to model and further develop teamwork through a professional development program focused upon a structured meeting process.
• The Program recognizes that all curriculum should be defined in terms of what students will learn and, in consequence, be able to do as a result of the teaching and learning process at Brewster.
• The Brewster program is based upon the belief that the outcomes of student learning are best determined when students have the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of these outcomes through meaningful, applied tasks.