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catching up with CINDY SABIK
Cindy Sabik arrived at Gilmour at just the right time. It was the late 1990s, when Socratic seminars, collaboration and critical thinking were reshaping the English curriculum. Having just earned her doctorate in urban education, she was looking for a school where students had a voice and teachers had the freedom to innovate. “When I went for the interview and learned about Gilmour’s teaching philosophy, I knew it was the perfect lab for me to practice the kind of teaching I believed in,” she says. It was the era of student-centered learning. Students needed agency, and Gilmour was giving it to them. Students were engaging in discussion with each other, asking critical questions and forming their own opinions. In teaching Grade 10 English, Sabik introduced students to acclaimed novels like The Things They Carried and Song of Solomon . She later moved to Grade 9 English, collaborating with her friend Frank McCamley and teaching across the disciplines with colleagues like Pat Brubaker, Bob Beach and Jim Gutowski to develop a curriculum using the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools. “It was a very special time at Gilmour,” she says. “We were building this beautiful, integrated curriculum that was all about collaboration and agency, and we had the freedom to design our own courses. That’s what drew me to Gilmour, and it’s what kept me there for 15 years.” The work Sabik did at Gilmour would shape the rest of her career. She left in 2012 to become Dean of Faculty at Worcester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she helped transform the curriculum by drawing on many of the ideas she’d embraced at Gilmour. Ultimately, she stepped away from education after the pandemic, when the focus shifted from student agency to survival.
But Sabik wasn't done learning. She found herself back in the classroom — this time as a student. This spring, she earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from Bennington College and is expanding her thesis and working on a long-form essay she hopes will become a book. In many ways, she's still exploring the questions that drew her to Gilmour. What began as an examination of Socratic seminars and the teaching of writing has grown into a broader exploration of the very purpose of schools in an age of artificial intelligence. “As someone who taught English and writing for years, I’m shocked at how much I didn’t know or understand,” she says. “There’s a level of authenticity missing from how we teach writing in schools that’s very interesting to me.” At the heart of the project is an idea that traces back to her years at Gilmour: the power of listening. The same skills that made the school's Socratic seminars so meaningful — things like thoughtful discourse and making others feel heard —are the ones that allow students to think for themselves. The latest chapter in Sabik’s life is her most important one. It allows her to build a career as a writer while spending time with family. She and her husband of 46 years now travel between New England and Pittsburgh to be with their children and nine grandchildren, including the newest baby, born in March. “I’m glad I wasn’t in charge, because I wouldn’t have known to dream this for myself,” Sabik says. “The future looks open and inviting, just like it did when I graduated from college the first time.”
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