January Term is in full swing! Students returned from break to embark on what Associate Head of School for Academics Sarah Donmez has termed the “holy grail of education,” two weeks of intensive study in an offbeat area of inquiry designed to supercharge student’s curiosity ahead of the start of second term. 

Ms. Doenmez, who is leading a J-Term course on “Storytelling and Public Speaking” this year, wrote to explain why she views this two-week interlude as a valuable supplement to the two academic terms of the school year. Here I paraphrase (liberally):

Whereas during core academic terms students are responsible for managing anywhere from five to seven courses across disparate subject areas, attending four unique class blocks each day where they’re asked to engage, disengage, shift attention, and then re-engage with completely different material every ninety minutes, J-Term reduces the number of competing claims for student’s attention, allowing them to focus intensely on a single subject over a sustained period of time. This is a serious benefit to our students. We know the ability to sustain attention is crucially important to the development of executive functioning skills that facilitate higher order cognitive tasks like planning, emotional regulation, task initiation, organization, impulse control, and all while promoting overall cognitive flexibility that allows students to develop as dynamic and lateral thinkers across other areas of their lives. 

Running with the theme of cognitive flexibility, Ms. Doenmez also explained that exploration is an overt goal of the J-Term curriculum. J-Term courses are less prescriptive, course syllabi looser, methods of instruction more decentralized, and a heavy emphasis is placed on learning experientially, whether through hands-on practicums or alternatives like, for instance, the field trip students in “CSI Dublin” recently took to a forensics laboratory at Keene State. Senior Jin F. returned from that field trip gushing about the experience and talking about how a gas chromatography demo put on for Dublin students relates to her own interests in the chemistry of perfume production. 

Many of the J-Term courses on offer this year are being co-taught by students. Others provide a platform for faculty to work outside of their departments and collaborate with colleagues they would not otherwise have an opportunity to work with. It’s great, for example, to see Lynn Johns, one of our school nurses, teaching that “CSI Dublin” course mentioned above; I vividly remember a faculty meeting earlier this fall and overhearing Lynn talk with serious enthusiasm about this opportunity to work with students in a setting other than health and wellness. And then there are courses like “Storytelling and Public Speaking,” led by Sarah Doenmez (History) and Evan Kendall (Math), that bring faculty from across departments together over mutual affinity for a topic. Our faculty are passionate about their particular fields, of course. But, like our students, they have interests that spill over departmental boundaries – J-Term provides an unique outlet for students and faculty alike to share those interests with the full school community.

As with everything we do at Dublin, J-Term is driven by elements of our Mission, most obviously relating to the purpose of awakening curiosity in students and providing an outlet for that curiosity to reign. 

Look forward to more in-depth coverage of individual courses in next week’s edition of the Quad!
 

Article by Liam Sullivan