Faculty members use summer curriculum grants to enhance learning
Thanks to a series of summer curriculum grants, several USN faculty members spent their summers reimagining how their subjects are taught, building stronger bridges between grade levels, and infusing their classrooms with joy, challenge, and purpose.
By Ian Dinkins, Assistant Director of Marketing and Communications
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Learning didn’t pause for summer break for several faculty members at University School of Nashville. Teachers who were able to use grants this year include: Fifth Grade Math Teacher Andres Victoria; High School Humanities Teachers Freya Sachs ’00, Anna Stern, Ayesha Nawaz, Mackey Luffman, and Phil Bandy; Lower School Instructional Coach and Math Specialist Iloire Nye; High School Chemistry Teachers Susan Meador and Anne Dervan; and High School Science Teacher Eric Royer.
The results of their work are already beginning to take shape in classrooms throughout the school, offering students more engaging, aligned, and thoughtful learning experiences.
For Fifth Grade Math Teacher Andres Victoria, the summer curriculum grant offered him a chance to rethink the entry point into USN’s Bridges mathematics program. Recognizing that fifth grade is a key convergence point for students from varied math backgrounds, Victoria designed and launched “Unit Zero,” a foundational module that refreshes core skills, establishes classroom routines, and ensures every student is ready to succeed throughout their journey in middle school math classes.
“Bridges is a conceptually rich program, but without a shared foundation, it can feel overwhelming,” Victoria said. “Unit Zero helps level the field so students enter with confidence and readiness.”
This new beginning serves as a springboard, enabling the class to move more efficiently through the Bridges curriculum. According to Victoria, students are already engaged in collaborative problem-solving, revising their thinking, and gaining momentum that will carry them through the year.
“So far, students are responding really well, and I’ve been able to use the materials and engage them in the kind of work that builds both confidence and community,” Victoria said. “We’re moving at a strong pace that feels sustainable, and I’m confident that we’re on track with the schedule I’ve mapped out for the year.”
Victoria’s grant also included an exploration into how Artificial intelligence tools can help support curriculum development.
“This work supports equity and challenge at the same time,” Victoria said. “And it ensures fifth-grade math is both a capstone to elementary learning and a bridge to middle school success.”
Meanwhile in High School, Sachs, Stern, Nawaz, Luffman, and Bandy used their summer to come together and build out a new iteration of Humanities 9, with the goal of creating a shared, interdisciplinary foundation for ninth graders as they begin their High School journey.
At the heart of the work is a core set of skills every USN High Schooler will now develop: how to engage in meaningful discussion, how to build an argument, how to write persuasively and creatively, how to listen with empathy, how to read and research thoughtfully, and how to learn by doing.
“The world is changing, education is changing, and what we are preparing students for beyond USN is different — it is interdisciplinary, creative, complex, and evolving,” said Sachs. “This course allows students to use their voices with purpose and gives them a shared academic identity as they enter High School.”
With several weeks of the semester under their belts, the Humanities team is already seeing results. Students are immersed in interdisciplinary inquiry, using the new assessments and lesson structures designed by the team this summer.
“We want students to see math as a way to play, puzzle, and wonder,” said Nye. “Math can be joyful, creative, and deeply human.”
The plan includes monthly math circles, installations in the building, and outdoor math walks, offering students the chance to explore big ideas in unfamiliar ways.
Meanwhile, the Perennial Math Competition, piloted last year with fourth graders, will return in full force and provide accessible, higher-level problem-solving challenges for students.
“We had first graders asking when they could participate in Perennial Math,” Nye said. “That level of excitement and engagement tells us we’re on the right track.”
For Nye, the work is deeply aligned with USN’s mission.
“This evolution builds continuity and coherence between Lower and Middle School math. It tells students: math belongs to you and it can be a lifelong source of joy.”
While Nye worked on ways to spread joy in the Lower School, the science department in the High School aimed to bring real-world applications to classrooms.
The results of their work are already beginning to take shape in classrooms throughout the school, offering students more engaging, aligned, and thoughtful learning experiences.
For Fifth Grade Math Teacher Andres Victoria, the summer curriculum grant offered him a chance to rethink the entry point into USN’s Bridges mathematics program. Recognizing that fifth grade is a key convergence point for students from varied math backgrounds, Victoria designed and launched “Unit Zero,” a foundational module that refreshes core skills, establishes classroom routines, and ensures every student is ready to succeed throughout their journey in middle school math classes.
“Bridges is a conceptually rich program, but without a shared foundation, it can feel overwhelming,” Victoria said. “Unit Zero helps level the field so students enter with confidence and readiness.”
This new beginning serves as a springboard, enabling the class to move more efficiently through the Bridges curriculum. According to Victoria, students are already engaged in collaborative problem-solving, revising their thinking, and gaining momentum that will carry them through the year.
“So far, students are responding really well, and I’ve been able to use the materials and engage them in the kind of work that builds both confidence and community,” Victoria said. “We’re moving at a strong pace that feels sustainable, and I’m confident that we’re on track with the schedule I’ve mapped out for the year.”
Victoria’s grant also included an exploration into how Artificial intelligence tools can help support curriculum development.
“This work supports equity and challenge at the same time,” Victoria said. “And it ensures fifth-grade math is both a capstone to elementary learning and a bridge to middle school success.”
Meanwhile in High School, Sachs, Stern, Nawaz, Luffman, and Bandy used their summer to come together and build out a new iteration of Humanities 9, with the goal of creating a shared, interdisciplinary foundation for ninth graders as they begin their High School journey.
At the heart of the work is a core set of skills every USN High Schooler will now develop: how to engage in meaningful discussion, how to build an argument, how to write persuasively and creatively, how to listen with empathy, how to read and research thoughtfully, and how to learn by doing.
“The world is changing, education is changing, and what we are preparing students for beyond USN is different — it is interdisciplinary, creative, complex, and evolving,” said Sachs. “This course allows students to use their voices with purpose and gives them a shared academic identity as they enter High School.”
With several weeks of the semester under their belts, the Humanities team is already seeing results. Students are immersed in interdisciplinary inquiry, using the new assessments and lesson structures designed by the team this summer.
In Lower School, Nye used her grant to create a two-pronged initiative in the Lower School, which includes expanding the Perennial Math Competition and introducing new ways to cultivate math joy outside the traditional classroom.
“We want students to see math as a way to play, puzzle, and wonder,” said Nye. “Math can be joyful, creative, and deeply human.”
The plan includes monthly math circles, installations in the building, and outdoor math walks, offering students the chance to explore big ideas in unfamiliar ways.
Meanwhile, the Perennial Math Competition, piloted last year with fourth graders, will return in full force and provide accessible, higher-level problem-solving challenges for students.
“We had first graders asking when they could participate in Perennial Math,” Nye said. “That level of excitement and engagement tells us we’re on the right track.”
For Nye, the work is deeply aligned with USN’s mission.
“This evolution builds continuity and coherence between Lower and Middle School math. It tells students: math belongs to you and it can be a lifelong source of joy.”
While Nye worked on ways to spread joy in the Lower School, the science department in the High School aimed to bring real-world applications to classrooms.
Meador and Dervan used their summer curriculum grants to redesign Chemistry II into a more applied, hands-on course that deepens understanding through real-world connections. They developed a framework for the course, defined learning objectives for students, and began to design the major projects based on those learning objectives.
“Our goal was to create a hands-on, project-based learning environment that emphasizes real-world relevance,” Meador said. “In addition to mastering key chemical principles, students will develop essential skills such as critical thinking, creativity, scientific communication, and a deeper curiosity about the world around them.”
Throughout the course, students will iteratively practice and strengthen core scientific skills like designing experimental procedures, graphing and interpreting data, applying chemical concepts to both lab settings and real-life scenarios, and developing clear, evidence-based scientific writing.
Royer also reimagined High School science classes by creating a flipped classroom model for AP Environmental Science, offering students more ownership of their learning and making space for deeper in-class discussions and labs.
“I was looking at how the science of learning takes place, the role of AI in high school and college education, and techniques to facilitate student engagement and buy-in while I was restructuring the course,” Royer said.
The goal of Royer’s work is to make learning more measurable for students so they see improvement, and to practice the assessment process more to help reduce assessment anxiety on higher-stakes, summative assessments.
The class will also continue to emphasize scientific writing and communication via labs and lab reports. While students have worked on this in the past, this school year will have a greater focus on writing.
“Authentic learning requires effortful participation and wrestling with concepts individually and collaboratively,” Royer said. “The goal of this evolution in AP Environmental Science is to engage students more with that piece of the puzzle in-class so that we can better evaluate how learning is taking place and problem solve together when we encounter adversity.”
This year’s curriculum grants reflect USN’s commitment to intentional teaching, a willingness to innovate, and a belief in the transformative power of learning.
“We’re not just teaching math or science or literature,” Nye said. “We’re helping students build their identities as learners. And that’s work worth doing every season of the year.”
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Email: info@usn.org
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University School of Nashville models the best educational practices. In an environment that represents the cultural and ethnic composition of Metropolitan Nashville, USN fosters each student’s intellectual, artistic, and athletic potential, valuing and inspiring integrity, creative expression, a love of learning, and the pursuit of excellence.