Faculty Profile - Rand Harrington
Rand Harrington joined Blake’s Upper School faculty in the fall of 2003. He is passionate about learning and teaching and believes that teaching critical thinking skills is vital to our children’s success.
Rand played alongside his "tinkering, building, engineering" father and his creative, artistic mother. As a child, his family moved a lot, and he spent much of his youth outdoors, where rock climbing and camping were favorite activities. His college career was "rather serendipitous" because he studied at three different colleges and took time off to travel and explore. At age 18, after less than a year of college, he hiked the Pacific crest trail from Mexico to Canada, a 2,600-mile trek that took six months. Rand also traveled to Southeast Asia, Burma, Thailand and East Africa, where he climbed mountains, studied the languages of Swahili and Nepali, and explored his environment. For 15 summers throughout his college career, Rand worked for the National Park Service in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, where he did mountain search and rescue work as a climbing ranger. In college, Rand studied geography, environmental science, and finally physics, which is what he now teaches at Blake. He has taught at every grade level from middle school, at a private school in California, to college, at the University of Maine.
While getting his doctorate at the University of Washington, Rand became interested in understanding how people learn and did research with the Physics Education Group. He also helped develop curriculum materials for the program Physics by Inquiry, used in classes for pre-service teachers, as well as Tutorials in Introductory Physics, used in calculus-based physics courses. Rand chose Blake because he liked the School's implementation of the Effective Teaching Initiative and its articulation of the curriculum across the grade levels. He wants "to be in an environment where people are motivated and interested in thinking critically about what they are doing and always striving to improve." To this end, Rand draws on his keen interest in technology use as a way to rethink both how and what he teaches.
"In the modern world, employers are more interested in people who can think for themselves and sort through reams of information to find the essential ideas required to make good decisions," Rand explains. "So it is more about being able to interpret and analyze complex situations, rather than recall facts. To teach a person how to be a better thinker is very difficult, and so as teachers, we have to work much harder to be successful with teaching these higher order skills."
Rand utilizes immediate feedback with his AP physics class through MIT's CyberTutor. The program gives students hints if they have difficulties with their problems, and Rand can view students' homework instantly, allowing him to revise his class on a daily basis. This way, students receive immediate feedback and Rand is able to identify student difficulties in time to alter his curriculum.
Rand's family has moved from Maine to California and now to Minnesota. Rand's spouse, Kathleen, is an RN and graduate student in the University of Minnesota's nurse practitioner program. Their sons, Joey, a seventh grader and Max, a fifth grader, both at Edina schools, love hockey. While Joey's passion is "tinkering and engineering," Max is already learning to invest money like the future businessman he may become. Every summer the family takes a pilgrimage to Wyoming, where the boys explore their world, just as their father continues to do.
Marcea Kjervik
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