Annual Dinner 2016

Transcript Walk into the classroom of a Bank Street teacher and you will see a room alive with purpose, a room where everyone is discussing, solving, and experimenting, where students are actively engaged in learning and where teachers embrace the whole student to nurture their cognitive, social, and emotional growth. Classrooms like this do not just happen. They are
created by educators with a solid understanding of human development, deep
experience in the field, and a disciplined approach to constant reflection. The groundwork for these special classrooms is laid here at Bank Street College. 100 years ago, Lucy Sprague Mitchell and her colleagues founded Bank Street as the Bureau of Educational experiments. Its purpose was revolutionary—to observe and document children to better understand the kinds
of environments best suited for their learning and growth. So when Lucy decided to start Bank Street, she moved to New York City and at the time she said, “I was tired of working in an ivory tower with golden domes but no firm foundations.” What she was talking about there was the process of engaging the whole person and trying to figure out with her colleagues how do young children develop and learn. “I believe human beings have undeveloped
powers to think to enjoy to create who care for the other fellow. I believe that development of these powers is society's best chance for its own improvement and that for such development, education is society's chief tool. I think what she understood is that young children need interaction and that at different stages of development the way they interact with materials, with teachers, with their peers is the sort of engine of growth and learning in its early years. The bureau opened the nursery school with a progressive curriculum designed for hands-on learning. These classrooms served as learning laboratories were Bureau staff observed and chronicled children's development. Children have a natural curiosity about their world they have a desire to make sense of their world and they do so much of that through play and I think that ability to observe children at play is a key component to what we have gotten and have inherited from losing Sprague Mitchell in 1930. The bureau moved to 69 Bank Street, a location that would become the College's namesake. Here, Lucy set up the Cooperative School for Student
Teachers, a teacher education program designed to stimulate the whole child in step with Bank streets humanist approach. Lucy established the Long Trip in which a group of student teachers traveled together to areas of the country dramatically different than New York. It was really expanding on the Bank Street community and taking a closer look at how the social and political issues of the day impacted these specific communities. They visited school children and they would actually go into the homes and see how the issues impacted families directly and how they impacted the children as
well as the effect that they all had on education of the day. Later, Lucy
established the Bank Street Writers lab, where authors such as Goodnight Moon. Margaret Wise Brown and writer and illustrators were encouraged to produce books that reflected an understanding of how children use language to understand the world around them. During this period, Bank Street began its work with the New York City Board of Education, launching the first of many professional development workshops for teachers using the College's methods. In the decades to follow, Bank Street continued to expand its impact on early education locally and across the country. The Bureau changed its name to the Bank Street College of Education, renamed and expanded the nursery school to become the School for Children, and grew to play a seminal role in the development of national resources to help improve early childhood education with decades of knowledge about what makes a good school. Bank Street, led by John Niemeyer and Barbara Biber, played a critical role in creating the nation's Head Start program. Parents often live in rural areas, especially in the south, and they had no access to good education so children needed environments which were supportive, environments which would respect them so all the things that Bank Street had learned about what were the best educational spaces for children, were incorporated but they also looked at parents and families. New things began to happen. The children became much more healthy. They were getting the medical attention they needed. They were doing better in school. Bank Street launched the Bank Street Readers, a series of multicultural urban oriented storybooks designed to engage early readers and reflect the real world, was completely revolutionary to take a reading text and have it be completely integrated and centered on city life in the 1970s. Bank Street moved to its current home on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Here the Family Center was founded to support children and their families within the local community. We were one of the first programs that really talked about the importance of family first, so hence the name Family
Center. It was really about parent education as much as it was child care
to support the education of children beyond New York. Bank Street launched the Center for Children and Technology and established the Principals Institute to help create leadership opportunities in education for women and minorities. Indeed many of the trailblazing ideas of Bank Street’s pioneers once considered radical have now entered the mainstream. Today in our centennial year, Bank Street is an established leader in early education, a pioneer in improving the quality of educational practice, and a national advocate for children and their families. In the hallways of our home
today at West 112 Street, we have become a community bound by a distinctive set of values and beliefs grounded in the philosophies set fourth by our founders and the great thinkers of Bank Street. The Bank Street
Graduate School of Education is a place where value based practice is learned
and enacted. It is child-focused inquiry-based and aims at seeing teaching and leadership as aiming toward a more socially just society. Developmental-interaction approach to teaching and learning recognizes that both children and adults learn best when actively engaged in the world with people, with materials, with ideals, and it's really to better understand the relationships between and among them. Our children's programs, the Bank Street, School for Children, the Family Center, Bank Street Head Start, Bank Street, Summer Camp, and Liberty LEADS serve as important learning environments to help children become critical thinkers and strong community members inside and outside of the classroom. We know that that students don't acquire information in isolation. They really need to see how pieces of information fit into how they make sense of the world and if you limit
your explorations to just the classroom or just the school you're hindering some of that learning and so connecting the work that we do in the classroom to the outside world is hugely important. Historically there's been a gap in
access to high-quality learning opportunities and that's been true on
the basis of race. It's been true on the basis of gender and the basis of
class. Today Bank Street is building on its deep history of research, support, and professional development to influence positive change for children in our programs like Liberty LEADS, like Head Start, like our Center for Culturally Responsive Practice, are all designed to bridge that gap and
to do so by ensuring that young people and their families are valued for the
strengths they bring and have access to the kinds of experiences we would want for our own children. The Straus Center is the research arm of Bank Street and so the Straus Center would look at teacher practice and look at early childhood practice in general. What do teachers need for support? What are teachers doing in the field how does that change depending on
the context? At Bank Street we understand that in every era new challenges arise, demanding innovative ideas practices and policies. In this landmark year Bank Street is proud to lead a new generation of students, educators, leaders, and visionaries as we carry Bank Street’s mission forward into the next century. Join us as we continue to strengthen the educational foundation set forth by Lucy Sprague Mitchell 100 years ago.