MICDS' Head of School Interview with Lisa Lyle, Part II

Friday, Lisa Lyle, MICDS' Head of School introduced us to the leadership position played by the alumni, the role technology plays in education and where MICDS fits into the broader community.

Here is more discussion with Lisa Lyle.

Patch: How do you pick that unique faculty to work here? What are you looking for with new hires?

Lisa Lyle: Hiring is absolutely my most favorite thing in the world to do. In my previous position as an assistant head, that was my focus. At MICDS, we have an assistant head of school who is responsible for the curriculum and professional development and the hiring.

When we are hiring people, we want to hire people who are deeply passionate about their disciplines and who are driven to work with children at the age group we are looking at. We have some people who are great with middle schoolers while others are focused on upper school kids and other folks who want to work with our youngest learners.

We want to make sure they have disciplinary expertise and people who are passionate about working with the kids at the level we are targeting, and they are reflective practitioners. For a long time, we believed teaching was an art. And you had some good teachers and some mediocre teachers, and you couldn’t do much about that.

In my family, I could not complain about teachers at the dinner table. It's a hard job, and we try to hire folks who are interested in how children learn.

We spend a lot of effort on professional development. We want teachers who will spend a lot of time on the work at hand. I like teachers who are specifically concerned with an individual child. If they (the teachers) think they’ve got it all figured out, then they might not be the right person for us.

We are a dynamic community of learners, and that includes children and adults. Our teachers have had to do a lot of access research and figure how best to mobilize children.

Patch: Tuition is high. Don't most families sacrifice to have their children in your school?

Lyle: Some people don’t realize that some families will sacrifice quite a bit to send their children here.

That’s a great question, because there is a naïve belief that our schools are filled only with children only from affluent families. That’s not the case at all. Twenty five percent of our kids receive financial aid. We have more than $3.7 million given each year in financial aid, and it's all need-based aid. It allows us to get close to being a meritocracy. All families, I believe, make a sacrifice to be here.

For some families that is a more significant sacrifice. Families across the socioeconomic spectrum are in our school and active participants. And when they receive financial aid, we want to make sure they are still involved in sports, trips to competition, spring sports trips to warm places, choir performances at Lincoln Center and other events where all our children might still participate.

We have lots of middle-class families who’ve made the decision to sacrifice financially because they realize a great investment at the lower school, middle school, upper school will prepare their children well as they go on to college. And all the data we get proves that out.

Patch: At 3 p.m. each day this place turns into one big athletic activity, right?

Lyle: Yes, but there’s also theatre going on and mock trial and extended day for our little guys and robotic and chess and bridge lessons, too. At 3 o’clock, we go into this co-curricular experience. I love to get up and walk around and be reminded how blessed we are to have 100 green acres of land and allow our children to be involved athletically. But I love to go into the black box theatre or the robotics theatre and see what they’ve built there and see the mock trial kids working on their briefs for the next trial, whatever it is.

That complement to an academic day is vitally important. The experience with the adults is deepened through these shared experiences, and the academic day is being reinforced by what is happening outside the classroom.

We have reserve football players who never get in the game. But they are there at all the practices, in the video sessions, taking part, feeling they are just as much a part of the team as the star players.

On the athletic fields, it's about team building. The kids come to realize the whole is more important than the individual. The sum is equal to all the parts.

Patch: What do you think lies ahead for your graduates?

Lyle: The full compliment of experiences is so valuable to our entire student body. I hope all of our students will go forth with a deep conviction and boldly face the challenges in the world they will live in and lead in the future. I think so much will be required of them as time goes on.

So much will be big and bold, and so many solutions will require global collaboration to be successful.

We look to our history and see that’s done time after time. I tell our kids to continue to live the legacy of Country Day and Mary Institute, and that can become many different things. One option is not apathy.

It gives me great pleasure to talk about the great work my colleagues are doing here every day. I am simply dazzled by the great work our students are doing here, and that will translate into somethng very good as time goes on.