All boys. All boarding. Grades 9-12.
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Let’s Take This Outside. How Woodberry Faculty Focus on Experiential Education
Even before COVID-19 made outdoor gatherings and social distancing safer than a traditional classroom, Woodberry faculty loved to get away from the desks and take their students outside. Before he became dean of students in 2019, Nolan LaVoie served as director of outdoor education and a member of the history department. He shared some thoughts recently on why Woodberry’s campus — and our all-boys, all-boarding model — create such a great learning environment.
Boys learn by doing, and we taught a lot outside already, even before COVID-19. Environmental science teacher Lewis Affronti takes his classes out for at least 40 percent of their class time in the fall and spring trimesters. You’ll see the class riding around in a pickup truck at night in the fall with a spotlight as they do a census of our campus deer population. Ben Hale has his English students go to one spot on campus each week for the entire year and journal so that they can observe the changes in the world around them.
This year we’re taking that even further. We’ve set up wi-fi hotspots all over campus so classes can be connected even when outside. And we’ve built new outdoor classrooms and meeting spaces around the campus.
Boys learn by doing, and a Woodberry education is very tactile. So when Dean of Faculty Matt Boesen taught his third-form history class about the Wright brothers, the boys worked with engineering teacher Abbie Mills to design and 3-D print plane wings that they could test in a wind tunnel. That project was so successful that this year Abbie is running a Project-Based Learning Lab where she partners with teachers across the school. One of her first projects was helping the advanced journalism class design and build a new TV studio for the show they broadcast every week.
Boys learn when they have agency, when they have deep relationships with their teachers and classmates, and when they are solving a real-world problem. Experiential learning is grounded in all three of those ideas, and Woodberry is the perfect place for it.
Woodberry Forest School is an exceptional private school community for high school boys in grades nine through twelve. It is one of the top boarding schools in the United States and one of the only all-boys, all-boarding schools in the country.
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Woodberry Forest admits students of any race, color, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, and national or ethnic origin to all of the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, or national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic or other school-administered programs. The school is authorized under federal law to enroll nonimmigrant students.