Meet a Knight: Photographer Jo Sittenfeld

Ms. Sittenfeld snapping a photo.

Our series "Meet a Knight" features discussions with members of the PCD community. We are beginning the year by speaking with the faculty and staff who are new to the school this year. After starting with college counselor Terry Ward last week, today's chat is with Art Teacher Jo Sittenfeld.

Ms. Sittenfeld actually joined PCD last spring, so this marks her first full school year at 660 Waterman Ave. She is a woman who wears many hats. At PCD she teaches photography and digital media. She also works as an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she currently teaches a range of photography classes and in RISD's "Project Open Door," an after-school program aimed at getting high school students interested in art. She somehow manages to take photographs for her own work, which she has exhibited all over the country. You can find her around PCD every day, either teaching a class or shooting photos of our busy students.

@PCD: Hi Jo, thank you so much for talking with us. How did you get into photography?

JS: Well I feel like my mom actually steered me--she would always get me these biographies of Margaret Bourque-White and all these pioneering women photographers when I was around eight. But when I was in college I took a photo class. I'd always loved art and art history, and thought it was this side thing I would do, and that I would be an English major or a science major or something like that. But during my sophomore year I took a photo class and it sort of changed my world and my life, and ever since then I have been doing photography steadily. I was an Art and Art History major and got my teaching certification, and from there taught high school art before I came to RISD and got my MFA in photography. It's always been this balance between making art and teaching it, which for me is a really good balance.

Señora Garcia-Mata's Easter Island Travels

Over the summer, three PCD faculty took advantage of E.E. Ford Summer Travel Grants to broaden their horizons. The grants, which support enrichment opportunities for full-time teaching faculty at the Providence Country Day School, are designed to enable teachers and their families to travel. Though the destinations and programs need not relate specifically to a teacher’s classroom curriculum, the broadened perspectives and ignited imaginations that only travel can inspire inevitably make their way into the classroom and the PCD community at large. One of the three recipients, Spanish Teacher Sarah Garcia-Mata, fulfilled a long-time goal of traveling to Easter Island, a small island in the South Pacific famous for the moai, or monolithic statues that dot the island's coast. We caught up with Señora Garcia-Mata and asked her to tell us a little bit about her experience and why she caught the travel bug.

Señora Garcia-Mata in front of moai on Easter Island

I love to travel! It is the only way to know cultures, peoples, languages and learn history without studying. For me it reaffirms the solidarity of humankind and the innate goodness of people. So funding for travel is paramount to me. In my language classes students have trouble remembering verb forms, but they do not forget my stories about adventures I had traveling, or some interesting factoid that I picked up somewhere along the way. Photos of pre-Incan salt mines in Peru necessitate a large amount of historical knowledge that the student would probably not remember if not seeing the pictures and figuring out (without realize their brain was doing it) all the ramifications of what pre-Incan means, the location, the history, etc., etc. My experience and personal photos of the many different Hispanic countries that I have visited make a big difference in my classes (at least I believe that). So I was incredibly fortunate to travel on an EE Ford grant this summer!

From Research to Practice

Daniel Willingham addresses 

a small group of PCD faculty.

Every year the PCD faculty has the chance to read a common book and kick-start the year with a discussion about teaching. This year featured an even better opportunity, as the author of the summer read came to speak with the faculty about the implications of his work.

Daniel Willingham's book, Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom, brings a variety of new psychological research to bear on some of the most pressing questions in education. The book emphasizes the incremental nature of learning, the importance of practice in developing deep understanding, and the idea that intelligence is malleable.

Faculty members clearly took the book to heart. “It confirms the perceptions we acquire through experience,” said English teacher David Cashman. Nowhere was this more true than in the book's call for a consistent, disciplined focus for teachers and learners alike.

It is no surprise, then, that the faculty and administration were so excited to spend a day with Willingham himself. His morning talk focused on students' attentiveness, and perhaps most importantly was filled with what English and Latin teacher Jane Kaufman termed “pragmatic suggestions” for getting students to focus on the material at hand. Willingham noted that, in the short term, paying attention is a decision. Students' brains quickly and subconsciously balance the quality and probability of outcomes with the level of difficulty, when they decide whether or not to pay attention. By changing those outcomes or the difficulty involved, teachers can affect attentiveness.

PCD faculty (from left to right) Dick Tierney,

Jen Aitken, Chris Dodd, and Sharon Hanover

discussing Willingham's research.

In the slightly longer term, Willingham suggested that both inward reflection--that is, taking time away from external distractions such as work or television--and sleep were crucial in building memory. Both are necessary for the brain to transform short-term memory into long term memory, which is a major step in developing deep understanding. Turning off both electronics and work for even thirty minutes a day, as well as getting to sleep earlier, might be two of the best things to do for improving brain function.

After lunch, Willingham worked more closely with some small groups of faculty on a range of topics. In all, the day was one of the most fruitful professional development days in PCD memory, as teachers left prepared and reinvigorated to begin the new school year with a handful of new ideas and tools to make their teaching even better