Press

Bennett Day School is a progressive school whose mission is to provide a collaborative culture that nurtures children’s innate sense of inquiry & curiosity. Cameron Smith is the Co-founder & CEO. He is a licensed attorney who didn’t like what he saw when looking for a school for his kids, so he took action and launched Bennett Day in 2014. It now has over 200 students and growing.

“‘Social media is not going away,’” says Martin Moran, lead designer and director of the upper school at Bennett Day School, Chicago. Teaching kids about social media is like teaching fish about water, he says. “‘Social media is everywhere.’”

Bennett Day School conducts official outreach to the wider community using several social media sites, including Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. The school currently offers pre-kindergarten-4th grade. A high school program opens next year. A lower grade is also being added each year. The school is in the West Loop and has 190 students.”

“Martin Moran discusses how to create a high school where adolescents can be creative and motivated. Lead designer and Director of the Upper School at Bennett Day School in Chicago This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.”

“Lunch is still important, judging from the Bennett Day School, a new private elementary on West Grand Avenue.

‘It’s part of a dialogue between the students and teachers,’ said director of admissions Amanda McQuade, noting teachers eat with their students, teaching them how to converse and conduct themselves. Eating is carefully integrated into the curriculum; for instance, kindergartners eat in their room.”

“The atmosphere at Bennett Day is “unabashedly progressive,” Cicchelli said, both in its pedagogy and outlook. Under the Reggio Emilia approach, questioning and willingness to change are imperative. “In a new school, we constantly have to look at what we are doing and how it will lead to skill-building,” she said. “We have a set of developmental milestones, but we don’t have a fixed curriculum we repeat every year. It’s a lot of work because you are constantly reinventing but it means you are constantly responding to the people in the room.”

“Bennett Day school programmed the interior shell of a historic Chicago building to serve as their flagship school. The flagship campus building, formerly known as Chicago Commons, was built in 1900 as a settlement house. It now houses one of the most progressive educational environments in the city.”

“The partnership is led by SESP Prof. Michael Horn and Bennett Day School teacher Frances Judd, who are both part of TIDAL Lab, a group that researches innovative, technology-based education. Northwestern faculty and students work with children to teach them technology skills and test prototypes for educational devices, Horn said.”

“What happens when some of the brightest minds in the country sit down with elementary school students to problem solve? Sometimes, they learn something. At least, that’s the goal of Northwestern University’s new partnership with Chicago-based Bennett Day School, which Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) posted an article about last week.”

“Parents shouldn’t expect school to be like it was when they were students. “What we’ve learned about the young brain in the past 20 years is amazing and has flipped the experience,” says Meg Fitzgerald, early childhood director at Bennett Day School in Chicago. “Good teaching is about learning processes, not just fact-based learning. And we know that real-world experiences are more beneficial than worksheets, because what’s personal to kids is what gets ingrained.”

“Bennett Day School founder and CEO Cameron Smith describes the school as the kind that families knew they wanted but it did not exist. “School is meant to be a community where students and teachers construct learning together,” Smith said.”