Dear Middle School Families,

Yesterday our Educational Administration team sat together to pause and reflect on our 2020 Strategic Plan. As Monday marked two years since the pandemic reared its' head close to home, I marvel at the words within part of our description of Educational Excellence:

Ensure the seamless continuity of a curriculum that highlights curiosity, growth mindset, creativity, risk taking, critical thinking and resilience.

The pandemic has required teachers to often re-invent instruction for remote and in-person learning while maintaining all that we cherish about learning at BZ. The resilience demonstrated by our teachers and students mirrors Jewish people. Resilience has been woven into the fabric of Judaism over thousands of years. Judaism has a central focus on helping people to live in the face of challenges, pain and tragedy. Similar to our people’s history, our resilience has been seen across classrooms throughout the last two years in addition to critical thinking, risk taking, creativity, growth mindset and continuity.

This week in classroom observations, I observed a class gather on a classroom rug to tackle Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. Among the students in a circle, a laptop sat between two students with a learner engaging in classroom conversation about the author’s style. While it appeared seamless, the resilience of the teacher and the student to make it work was evident. Students both at home and in class were prompted after each section of text to think critically about the author’s style. 

This week when I think about creativity and risk taking, I think about our science classes and our current work with coding of video games and artificial intelligence. In our seventh grade science class, students are using Microsoft Makecode Arcade. This robust system allows for coding of video games using blocks, but also allows students who are ready to advance by using Javascript or Python. Through this project, students are learning basic coding skills including using variables to track changing information (in video games, that can be anything from the player's score, to how many characters there are, to whether or not a key has been used yet) and building logic statements to manage outcomes. 

Through the production of student created video games students are learning computational thinking. Computational thinking refers to strategic thought and problem-solving through algorithms or other steps that could be completed by a computer. Our students are essentially thinking and acting like a computer scientist interacting with technology. Students create algorithms or step-by-step instructions to create a pattern or set outcome through coding and present the information through their video game.  

As our eighth graders are deep in a unit on Artificial Intelligence, their work from seventh grade serves as a foundation to their coding and creation of more complex systems using real-world data as well as understanding the logic behind coding. Yesterday, Ms. Brenda Lopez-Silva joined Ms. Sanzenbacher virtually as a guest teacher from California. Ms. Lopez-Silva works with Argonne National Laboratory and the Art Institute and is helping to lead students in examining music as a source of data.

Together, they are looking closely at how Spotify classifies songs. They started by understanding the features used by Spotify to classify music including Danceability, Energy, Acousticness, Speechiness, Valence, Liveliness and Instrumentalness. By exploring the rating scales for each feature, students are able to understand how to see a song as data and to identify potential biases of artificial intelligence. Students will soon move to developing a model to determine the genre of a song and then test each others’ models and again identify bias in AI. Our eighth graders will not only have a hand in writing code, but equally as important, they will gain an understanding of computer science and the logic behind coding.

Our resiliency, creativity and boundless curiosity continue to be at the forefront of every instructional decision made. Together, faculty and administration hold tight to providing curriculum that builds on student interest and wonder—while also strengthening foundational skills. While the past two years have required us to twist and turn, reflect and alter, toss out and recreate, our resiliency, much like our Jewish history, has been a giant strength to continually propel us forward.

B’Shalom,

Stephanie Bloom
Head of Middle School