After months of planning and four amazing days during which small groups of students spent time with one or two faculty members, Project Period is over. Throughout the week, Project Period Coordinator Patty Pond helped capture student reflections on what community means to them. You can hear a few of these snippets in the video below, but if you were present at Proctor's 3rd Annual St. Baldrick's Event, you felt the Proctor (and local Andover) community in action. 

Project Period accomplishes many educational goals, and as Head of School Mike Henriques explained in yesterday's Mike's Notes, we should try to do more of Project Period during the course of the year. This year, faculty offerings spanned an astounding 42 different projects. Students went dog sledding in northern Maine, developed business plans and visited start up companies in Boston, served food at a soup kitchen, learned to make a quilt, fabricated a metal video tower for athletic fields, earned Lifesaving and CPR certification, Hunter and Bow Saftey Certification, and studied law at the State House. One group learned to play guitar and even recorded THIS SONG! 

Other groups volunteered at the Andover Elementary Middle School, a local preschool, worked on a farm, and planned and hosted Proctor's 3rd annual St. Baldrick's event in the Farrell Field House. Other groups summited Mount Washington, went bow hunting in New York, learned about pipeorgans, sat in on live surgery as part of a Sports Medicine study, learned the Lakota Way, and built CO2 powered race cars. The list is as diverse as our faculty's interests, and that is what makes the week so special. Project Period is all about relationships; relationships with each other and relationships with what we are learning. 

At the foundation of learning is trust in those around you, a trust that allows vulnerability, risk-taking, and exploration of life beyond your comfort zone. Without the trusting relationships among students and between students and faculty, deep learning, life-changing learning, isn't going to happen. 

Many thanks to Patty Pond for organizing this year's Project Period and for all the faculty members whose creativity and commitment to Proctor's educational model of hands-on, experiential learning in small group settings made this past week as powerful as it was. Check out hundreds of photos shared by faculty and students at the link below!