A group of five educators from Nigeria visited DCD on February 24. Here for the NAIS conference in Boston February 25-27 at the Hynes Convention Center, they took some time out of their schedule to get to know a local school.

None of the teachers knew each other before arriving in Boston. Ade Fakoya, a teacher and academic dean from the Sunnydale School in Lagos, said they chose DCD from three possible NAIS schools to visit, including Buckingham Browne & Nichols School and Boston Latin School. “We looked at the Web sites, and DCD seemed closest to our own schools in its small size and in having two classrooms per grade.” Speaking about her own school, she said, “We are deliberately small.”
 
She and the others—Victoria Muorah, of the CEDEC International Group of Schools, Patricia Okafor and Florence Omole of the Halifield Schools, both in Lagos, and Agnes Eta of AP Montessori School in Calabar—visited classrooms and the library, met with teachers and administrators, and enjoyed lunch and conversation with Lower School students. Each of the five teachers privately funded her own trip.
 
Omole remarked on the informal dress code at DCD, noting that students in Nigeria wear uniforms. Fakoya said she found that students were very “immersed” at DCD, comparing our students’ work on Medieval wooden shields in woodworking class to her students’ flag-making projects, noting both used the same hands-on approach to learning about a subject but with different materials. She ended the visit by saying “you have a beautiful school, not just in appearance, but in the ambiance and in the nature of the children.”