Our next ASpotlight Interview is with Lorenzo Bellard, Fourth Grade Teacher and Community Life + Diversity (CL+D) Co-Director. Read below to learn more about how Mr. Bellard imparts his love of music to his students, encourages student-directed learning and discovery in his humanities classes, and is a leader in our school’s on-going journey to becoming a more inclusive, anti-racist community.
Can you tell me about your introduction to the field of education?
I started my teaching career at Friends Seminary downtown as an assistant teacher for Kindergarten. That was my very first official teaching position at an independent school. Basically, I was a jungle gym. I was 22 years old, just starting to get a feel for teaching. I was there for a year. I was a sports coach that year too – coaching the Middle School girls’ soccer team. They had the most success they’d ever had. I enjoyed that a lot. I also coached JV girls’ basketball. They allowed me to explore those different facets, which was great.
So, I left Friends Seminary for Trinity School and was a fourth-grade assistant for three years in the same classroom. My last year there, I was a first-grade assistant.
After that, I came to Allen-Stevenson, where I am currently a fourth-grade teacher.
What do you like most about teaching Fourth Grade?
At this age, students are a little more mature. The conversations you can have are more in-depth, and you can challenge a child’s thinking to become more abstract. They can infer things. You can see that development with them, and that’s exciting. And they want to learn – learning is fun for them, and it is a genuine interest.
In what ways do you see being a single-gender school as an advantage?
I am the product of an all-boys school in Minnesota - I loved it. I think at co-ed schools, there are pressures from the social dynamics between girls and boys. But, at an all-boys school, that is not present. It’s important to let the boys know to be themselves from an early age. You can be silly; you can be interested in all types of things; you can be you. You can still get that confidence and individuality at a co-ed school, but at an all-boys school, you can be very intentional about it. I think that ties in directly with our motto, “there are many ways to be a boy.” For example, we might listen to different kinds of music. If a boy brings up a unique interest, I say, “that’s so cool” and encourage them to share.
Our other fourth-grade teacher, Sarah Luposello, and I use our advisory periods to this end as well. We decided we want our advisory time to have more structure. We both think it is important for the boys to see each other differently. So, we came up with the idea for the boys to give presentations on themselves. We have a ‘student of the week.’ The boys share a presentation highlighting something that we wouldn’t necessarily know. For example, students can share about different family dynamics, special talents, and hobbies. A lot of them have shared about different music that they like or instruments or sports that they play.
What are you hoping the rest of the class gains from listening to their peers’ presentations?
I hope that they take away that it’s cool to have interests that are different from others. Also, they can make connections to boys that they weren’t very aware of before. It’s a great way to form community and connections and to make new friends.
Is there any particular passion of yours that you incorporate into your classroom curriculum?
Music, definitely. Music is a big part of my life. I always try to play music that I know the boys are not going to hear otherwise. Particularly with this generation they constantly hear the same types of music and I want them to know there’s more out there. We listen to jazz music in the mornings often. Interestingly, I had a parent during a conference say their son is really into jazz now. I understand how impactful and memorable those little things are about teachers. I remember those nuances about teachers from when I was a child.
I often do a morning focus. We live in a very busy city and things happen all the time and move quickly, so it’s important to be able to stop and sit and be reflective and do nothing else for that moment. I put on instrumental music for a few minutes. They sit with nothing in their hands and just listen and think about the feelings and things that come to mind. At the end of the piece, I ask students to share what came to mind or of what the music reminds them. They might say something like, “this one reminded me of a journey through space.” Sometimes I let them guess the title of the song. It’s a great creative tool.
So, music can really be helpful with social-emotional development. In the Fourth Grade, we try to incorporate social-emotional learning into our existing curriculum as much as possible.
What benefits do you think technology has for educators? In what ways do you utilize it in the classroom?
Technology is the future. Fourth Grade is the first year that the boys have a laptop that is theirs. We expose them to Google Docs and other educational tools. They can now access so much– it’s more than they’ll ever need. As such, it’s important to teach them responsibility. Because technology– video games, YouTube, stuff like that—for them is entertainment. But we want to redirect that to show them what a powerful educational tool it can be. We talk a lot about internet safety and the accuracy of information. The School has an Acceptable Use Agreement (AUA), which we discuss, as well as how to access good information.
I hear so many positive comments about the fourth-grade humanities curriculum, the Mesopotamia Game in particular. Can you tell me about your humanities program?
We start with a mapping unit that focuses on how geography affects civilization development. We challenge the boys to consider what they would need to survive if they were dropped in the middle of nowhere. They say things like water and food first. Then we stretch them to consider other items like clothing. Where does clothing come from? Where would you get those materials? This puts them in the mindset that in order for a civilization to survive somewhere, certain resources need to be present. Next, they draw where they live and look at what they see. Most of them live near water. Then, we look more closely at major cities across the world and they see that many of these are on major bodies of water.
So, at the onset of the Mesopotamia unit, they learn that Mesopotamia existed between two major rivers – Tigris and Euphrates. We want them to understand that civilizations exist because certain things need to be in place, but let them figure it out on their own. It really sticks in students’ minds when they make the connections through their own research and it gives them pride over their learning.
The Mesopotamia simulation allows information to be accessible by many different types of learners, too. Some students are visual learners; others benefit more from hands-on learning. The simulation requires extensive collaboration through reading comprehension, math calculation, research, strategizing, and creating and building. The simulation provides opportunities for overall academic skill development – and it’s also fun, which is a huge plus for their learning.
The boys are not necessarily going to remember all the dates and names, but to me, that’s not the important part. The important part is the overarching concept. They’re not going to remember all of Hammurabi’s Code’s laws, but they will remember the impact that law has on civilizations. What is it for? Are laws always good? What role did social class play in the development and enforcement of laws? How does this relate to today? They begin to see that civilizations often mirror each other over time and can begin to see where the similarities exist in society today. They’re starting to draw these connections. For us, that’s the takeaway we want. We start from the concrete, more tangible concepts of physical necessity and move to the more abstract concepts like religion, communication systems, government.
We talk a lot about social classes – who has the power and why? In the Fourth Grade we begin to talk about value and, more specifically, how it is assigned through social classes in civilizations. We focus on specific roles, and each student has an opportunity to play each role during the simulation. Initially, they all want to be the “ruler,” but then they realize that the “artisans” have a really important role to play because they make things. Then begins the conversation about whether or not value and social class are the same. We go on to tie this into our current civilization, talking about teachers, medical responders, plumbers, farmers - they’re the foundation of our society, and that’s an important concept to learn.
You are a co-chair of Community Life + Diversity (CL+D). Can you describe what this role entails, and why it is important for the faculty, staff and school community?
CL+D ties in directly with our mission, which states that we strive to create a school environment that is mindful and intentional about understanding the whole boy and inspiring in them an appreciation for responsible citizenship.
Having an organization that solely focuses on diversity and equity is important because we need to make sure our actions reflect our beliefs. I think CL+D allows us to do that because it keeps us in touch with the pulse of the School. It provides the opportunity for us to come together, have at times difficult conversations, and thus better informs our community when deciding how we continue to move forward together. We want to make sure that all voices in our community are being heard and we can be that soundboard when it is in regard to diversity and equity.
We meet once a week, and our agenda is always focused on our school’s mission to provide an inclusive, educational environment for everyone in our community.
All faculty have been asked to have a diversity goal as part of their portfolio. We want to provide resources for our teachers, like professional development opportunities and speakers, addressing how we apply these goals and concepts in our teaching.
This year we are implementing the Pollyanna Racial Literacy Curriculum. How do you feel like this will make us a more inclusive, anti-racist community?
The most important thing about this curriculum is that it intentionally invites conversations we need to have about equity, power, social constructs, and policy and how they have contributed to a systemic, racist society. It’s not possible to expect change to happen if you don’t address these issues.
This curriculum prioritizes and scaffolds ways for us as teachers to have these difficult conversations. It is designed so that teachers can educate about the issue of systemic racism in a way that the students can absorb and understand. I like how it has been laid out across grade levels.
Through CL+D we have also started having important parent talks that align with our school’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. These should continue and ALL parents should attend because these discussions provide insight and tools for difficult and uncomfortable conversations in the home. It’s not enough to just talk about these issues at school. Children are constantly making meaning of the world around them, so it’s important for them to speak up about equity and community building around issues of race at home.
A-S teachers are also helping to facilitate these conversations in the home by creating assignments requiring talking about equity, power, and social divide at home. We hope this helps provide a platform to discuss these issues.
It’s important to keep our momentum going. Allen-Stevenson has taken a number of steps to ensure we provide an anti-racist curriculum. As we move forward, it has become abundantly clear that educational institutions should be pro-active about their commitment to equity and inclusion within the community.
You help lead Middle School BOCAS (Boys of Color at Allen-Stevenson). Tell me about that. What do you hope your students get out of their experience in BOCAS?
I have heard on a number of occasions people refer to affinity groups as divisive. Ideologies can be divisive. Affinity groups, however, are a natural part of society and do more to keep groups and communities together.
No one should understand this more than educators. In schools, we actually divide students into grades. Although they are not a minority or marginalized group, they are essentially affinity groups. And obviously we do this for specific pedagogical reasons. As another example, if you are forming classrooms at a co-ed school and very few students identify as female, you would want to put them in the same room, NOT split them up. It’s something we do naturally because we understand the importance of shared experiences.
Having been a student in independent schools myself, I know there are few young black men. Additionally, we didn’t have a dedicated time and space for People of Color (PoC) students to come together. We just created it ourselves a bit. I have a photo of all the black boys in my class together at graduation and was reflecting recently on how great it would have been to have had an affinity group and why it is important to me that I be a part of BOCAS at A-S.
It would be naïve and irresponsible to have no affinity spaces. Our boys are very fortunate that A-S understands the value they (BOCAS and ERGO) provide to our students. It is developmentally important that our boys of color are seen and heard. In BOCAS, we don’t talk just about systemic racial issues – often, it is just about the day-to-day. BOCAS enriches our students of colors’ experiences at Allen-Stevenson.
How does the rest of our community at Allen-Stevenson benefit from affinity groups like BOCAS?
Everyone benefits when the members of their community have confidence in themselves and feel supported by their community. Affinity groups are an intentional recognition of the many different and valued groups that form our A-S community. It says something about our administration – we have this space for our boys because it’s important and because they are important to the School.
