An article and photo on our recent Chinese New Year Celebration Assembly can be found at the “Minuteman News Center.”  Click the link to read: Students Celebrate Chinese New Year.

From the “Daily Fairfield” website:  Eighth-graders from Fairfield’s Unquowa School worked together on a project with fifth-grade students at Bridgeport’s New Beginnings Family Academy. The two groups of kids spent the last few months studying the history of architecture and urban development using Bridgeport as a real-world example. Click here for the article and photos.

The January/February edition of Fairfield Living magazine included a great article on Unquowa’s dining program.  They noted that “our dining program … sets an example of sound nutrition, clear ethics and environmental awareness.” Click here for the article and photos.

The Fairfield Citizen ran a wonderful article entitled “Kingdom of Unquowa enchants, entertains audience.”  Click here to read the article and see the photos

Our own Chef Peter is the Featured Chef for Farmers’ Cow.  In the article on their web page, Peter explains that, “The Farm-to-Fork dining program at The Unquowa School is a nationally recognized, sustainable dining program that emphasizes regional/seasonal menus using mostly organic fruits and vegetables, baking all of its own bread, using grass fed and free range meats and, of course, The Farmer’s Cow dairy products.”

Click here to read the entire article and get Peter’s recipe for Fresh Mozzarella Pizza.

The Unquowa School began its chef residency program in the fall of 2010 in an effort to contribute to the goal of bringing newly graduated culinary students into the world of sustainable school dining. Conceived of by Unquowa’s chef, Peter Gorman, with support from John Turenne of Sustainable Food Systems, it is the school’s hope that this residency will help to provide trained chefs for the ever-growing world of nutritionally sound and environmentally and ethically aware school dining programs. — Sharon Lauer, Head of School

An article by our first Chef Resident, Lauren Issaeff, was published in Edible Nutmeg, a national, community-based publication that promotes local food, farms and cuisine of Connecticut.  On page 22 of the Late Summer 2011 edition Lauren recounts her experience with our kindergartners and a trip to Sport Hill Farm in Easton.

Click here to go to the publication and then turn to page 22.

The Unquowa School, in collaboration with three other leading progressive schools, plans to create a visionary teacher education program that aims to change the landscape of how teachers prepare for their profession. A $250,000 Education Leadership Grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation to The Cambridge School of Weston, along with matching funds raised by the partner schools, will help the collaboration launch the Progressive Education Lab (PEL), a two-year teaching fellowship that places aspiring teachers in schools from the get-go and provides a dynamic, experienced based training not typically found at traditional university-based education programs.

Leaders from the four schools - The Cambridge School of Weston in Massachusetts, The Putney School in Vermont, The Calhoun School in New York City, and Unquowa - will begin planning the program immediately, and PEL is expected to begin accepting applications from candidates who will enter the program in September 2012.

This unique collaboration brings together four very different schools; two city-base, two rurally-based; and upper and elementary school divisions. Each school will provide PEL teaching fellows with exposure to certain kinds of learning and teaching. For example, they may learn about integrated studies at CSW, project-based learning at Putney, the city as school at Calhoun, or museum collaboration at Unquowa.

The idea for such a program was born at a symposium on progressive education at Putney last summer, where leaders from these four schools brainstormed ways to foster teacher training that was, at its heart, truly progressive.

Currently, a majority of traditional teacher training takes place at colleges and universities, away from the classrooms and the environments where teachers would actually teach. Oftentimes, school leaders have found a disconnect between theory and practice. The PEL collaboration seeks to find ways for progressive schools to take the lead on teacher education that would not only train new teachers but strengthen teaching at each of their schools.

As the grant team explained in its application, the Progressive Education Lab is premised on the schools’ shared belief that “progressive schools offer the ideal environments in which to train skillful teachers. These communities demand both deep subject-matter knowledge and creative child-centered and inquiry-based pedagogy. They also require an enduring understanding of how children learn and grow, the ability to connect school to the community, and stamina.”

The Edward E. Ford Foundation aims to improve secondary education as provided by independent schools in the United States. The educational leadership grant is the largest grant that the foundation awards each year to schools that propose a program that’s generative, transformational, replicable, includes partnerships with other schools or organizations, and addressees the question: “What is the public purpose of private education?”

The Unquowa School was recently included in an article in the ED TECH online magazine entitled “Shifting Skill Sets”.  Technology Director, Lloyd Mitchell, describes how the school has integrated cloud computing into its technology plan. Click here to read the article

Our Cloud Computing Program was also included in an article entitled “On Cloud 9″ in the both the online and the print version of  the JOURNAL, a magazine dedicated to “transforming education through technology.”  Click here to read the article.

The Children of Bassac young adult dance troupe from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, recently spent the day at The Unquowa School. Students enjoyed an hour-long performance before the dancers led small group workshops in dance for the students. Click here to read the article in the Fairfield Citizen.

The April 2010 issue of the CT Cottages and Gardens magazines includes an article entitled “Sustainable Connecticut: the Great School Food Makeover” featuring The Unquowa School’s dining program.

The Unquowa School was John Turenne’s first client when he began Sustainable Food Systems. Our Head of School, Sharon Lauer, approached him after hearing him speak at the National Association of Independent Schools Sustainable Institute in 2005. Sharon was already interested in making our dining program more organic and sustainable and John’s consulting program was created to help institutions shift their menus to locally sourced products.

Click here to read the article.