2006-2007 Fall/Winter Directions - Friends' Central School

CAMPUS LOG – MIDDLE SCHOOL
A.C.E.—At Your Service
As of this fall, Friends’ Central
Middle School students have an
extra resource at their disposal—
the Academic Center for
Excellence, or A.C.E. as it is more
commonly known. The idea for A.C.E.
and its corresponding website grew out of Deb
(Peltz) Fedder’s ’79 desire to reach more students
than her work as a language skills
teacher allowed. Since 1993, Fedder has taught
a language skills class to the approximately
thirty seventh and eighth grade students who
choose the course rather than begin a foreign
language. But unfortunately, because of its
focus on skills, the course has been viewed as
remedial, even though no one, Fedder
explains, ever grows beyond the need for attention
to skills.
Fedder, who holds a master’s degree in
administration and social planning from
Harvard Graduate School of Education, has
always been interested in how kids learn, and
she is thrilled about the way our society has
developed a comprehensive and compassionate
understanding of the variety of learning styles.
One thing, however, has become increasingly
clear to her—no matter what type of learner
you are, basic skills such as time management,
note-taking, organized research, or test-taking,
just to name a few, profoundly influence academic
success. Different learners may acquire
and deploy these skills in different ways, but
everybody needs them. What’s more, everybody
needs to review them, again and again.
An important moment in the creation of
A.C.E. came when Fedder came across a site
sponsored by Dartmouth College called the Academic Skills
Center that offered exactly the type of reinforcement and support
that she was offering through language skills to a student body
that seemingly had already achieved a high level of academic success.
Fedder visited Dartmouth last year and met with the
Director of the Academic Skills Center. This visit corroborated
her own sense that learning and teaching are a team effort and
that kids of all levels and all competencies, even Ivy League students,
can never get enough of this type of skill-based support
and reinforcement.
24 DIRECTIONS Fall 2006 / Winter 2007
Deb Fedder ’79 working with Munir Abdus Shakur ’12 in A.C.E.
“In no small part,” Fedder explains, “academic success
depends on how resourceful students can be about doing what
they are responsible for doing.” But most courses are content
driven. Teachers everywhere design syllabi around texts and the
ideas or concepts they want to tackle, and there isn’t always
enough time to identify and then teach all of the skills the students
need in order to master that curriculum. Enter A.C.E.—a
multi-purpose room for students and teachers alike that sets out
to erase the stigma attached to working on skills.