Rick Rizoli - The Rivers School

“I have definitely
realized a lot of things
I want to do as a
teacher as a result of
having been back in
the classroom with a
couple years of teaching
under my belt.”
Mac Caplan,
Upper School English
teacher
of lifelong learning and purpose where relevance and personal
meaning are exemplified and valued.”
Upper School English teacher Mac Caplan is one of these practitioners.
He is constantly honing his skills outside the classroom and
is now approaching his fifth and final summer at Middlebury College’s
Bread Loaf School of English, where he’ll receive a master’s degree
in English this year.
“I have definitely realized a lot of things I want to do as a teacher
as a result of having been back in the classroom with a couple years
of teaching under my belt,” said Caplan.
Caplan says he has received unwavering professional and financial
support from Rivers during his graduate work. Without this assistance
he would have had to make a choice: save money over a much longer
period of time or not go to Bread Loaf at all.
“Rivers made it an easy choice,” he said.
When discussing how his studies have amplified his expertise and
impacted his role as a faculty member at Rivers, Caplan points to a
number of things: specific texts he studied at Bread Loaf that he now
teaches at Rivers, a graduate course that allowed him to lay the foundation
for an elective he is teaching this spring, and a fiction writing
class that took him out of his comfort zone and helped him identify
with students who may be approaching something new at Rivers. He
also says taking a closer look at certain texts he was already teaching
has been helpful.
“[For example, studying A Raisin in the Sun at Bread Loaf] made
me much more confident and knowledgeable about the text and
helped me understand it in a much deeper way,” he said.
Middle School humanities teacher, Melissa Dolan ’98, agrees.
She is pursuing a master’s in liberal arts with a concentration in history
at the Harvard Extension School. There, she has built upon her
expertise in African history, taking several courses that focus on the
subject in general and, specifically, Nelson Mandela.
Dolan says her interest in the topic directly
stemmed from teaching an apartheid unit in seventh
grade humanities at Rivers. Now, her graduate
work informs her teaching and has “fed the unit.”
“[My graduate studies] allow me to go into
much more depth about the subject matter and
think about it in new ways,” said Dolan. “I ask
myself, ‘How can what I’m learning through my
courses feed what we do here at Rivers and the
way we learn’ When I take what I learn at the
graduate level and put it into a seventh grade
classroom, I’m looking at the big questions that
[the students] can relate to. They can’t necessarily
relate to being in a prison cell for 27 years unfairly,
but they can certainly relate to the idea of
unfairness. I look for the universal themes that
will really appeal to the age group.”
Leeming hopes to follow in this practice
and teach his specific subject matter at Rivers
someday, but in the meantime he says his coursework
directly shapes his teaching style and helps him empathize
with Rivers students.
“Being a full-time professional student and a full-time
professional teacher are one and the same project for me,”
said Leeming. “When I’m a student, I’m always thinking
about teaching and when I’m teaching, I’m always thinking
about learning and how they inform each other.”
Middle School Dean of Students Clinton Howarth pulls
from his experience as a graduate student in his multi-faceted
role at Rivers. Howarth, who came to Rivers in 2004 after
working in public relations for three years, earned a master’s
degree in education from Boston College in 2011. He says
graduate school gave him the opportunity to learn the theory
behind his practice and helped him recognize that the depth
of expertise among his colleagues in the Middle School
serves as a necessary jumping off point for innovation.
“[Graduate school] made me realize that what we do here
in the Middle School is so forward-thinking,” he said. “I would
talk about the things that we’re doing so nonchalantly and
[my fellow students] would look at me and say, ‘How do you
do that’”
When characterizing the overall expertise of faculty
members at Rivers, it’s impossible to ignore the intermingling
of deep subject knowledge and excellence in teaching that
largely defines the faculty’s approach and shapes the student
experience.
“The expertise with the subject lets you be dynamic within
your subject, but then there’s this unbelievable depth of ‘kid
knowledge’ at Rivers,” said Howarth.
The keen ability of Rivers faculty members to understand
students and leverage relationships creates a symbiotic
4 • Riparian • Spring 2012