This article was written by Virginia Brown and originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly Magazine.
Wellington's first woman head of school wants students to learn how to think, not what to think.
Walk through the halls of the Wellington School in Upper Arlington, and you'll see the usual things: students huddled around lockers and laptops, classrooms equipped with white boards and wall clocks.
But it's what you hear that matters most to Eliza McLaren.
"Joy is the magic ingredient in schools, and it's one of the hardest things to fix fi it's not there," says McLaren, who recently became the first woman head of school at Wellington since it opened in 1982.
"Part of what I was looking for in a school was that you could sense joy when you walked in," she says. "When you hear laughter and bustle and excitement, those are big signs of joy in a school."
Joy is cultivated through culture. "It's a culture where everyone matters, where there's a real seriousness to our work, a belief that our work is vital ... but it has to be joyful."
A former history teacher, field hockey and softball coach, and marketing and admissions leader, McLaren moved to Columbus with her husband and two children from Annapolis, Maryland, where she worked at Indian Creek School.
She was drawn to Wellington's entrepreneurial spirit, its high level of student engagement and its mission statement: We help students find their purpose and realize their potential for tomorrow's world.
The final two words--tomorrow's world--stood out in particular. "It carries with it a sense of responsibility, that we need to focus on tomorrow's world and not necessarily on today's" McLaren says. "There's a real implied optimism to it that we're preparing students for abetter world."
Part of that preparation is teaching students how to think, not what to think.
Civil discourse permeates Wellington's curriculum, but it's especially salient in this election year. "We don't have to be talking about the issues and policies of today's political climate," she says. "We need to be learning how to research, how to form an opinion, what rhetorical strategies are there to convey something and convince people."
First graders at Wellington learn what it means to be a member of a community--a family, school or local community. "They take field trips to meet the mayor and tour the post office, to gain understanding of how municipal services work and how to advocate in your community," she says.
DebateAble is a third grade social studies program that helps foster critical thinking, tolerance for different viewpoints, public speaking skills and teamwork.
In middle school, the curriculum centers on discourse skills. "They learn how to listen, how to form an opinion and how to engage others in a way that brings them into the conversation," she says.
Students also learn how to debate a topic that is identified as important to that age group. "It could be something having to do with our uniform or whether we should censor a certain phrase that is too popular in the lingo," she says. "Through a moderated debate, they learn the skills that they're going to need down the road to be informed, contributing citizens."
In the Upper School, courses like Re-framing Conflict, part of the English curriculum, teach how to use nonfiction to research topics from many angles. And the Debatriot Club is an extracurricular group that debates topics with structured rules that invite participants into conversation and help form consensus.
Wellington is also considering technology and the impact it can have on a school day.
"In schools, we have an obligation to think really carefully about how we use our students' time and how we direct their attention," she says.
One hopeful trend McLaren sees is a commitment to rethinking screen time and device use.
Wellington does not allow personal digital devices through eighth grade, and in the Upper School, cell phones aren't allowed in academic spaces. "We have our parent groups talking about social media norms ... how old they are when they get to start using it, and the limits were going to place on it. I think were really leading the way there."
"The time they have in childhood is a scarce resource," she says. "We have to treasure it."