Wheeling Country Day School is a student-centered, active, family-oriented environment. Preschool - 8th-grade children are encouraged to take risks and develop confidence and pride in their ability to learn. At its mission WCDS empowers students to think, to create, and to communicate in a nurturing environment where learning and character are paramount. Focused on the process of learning over the products, WCDS engages students and teachers to learn something new.
With an opening in our elementary school, Wheeling Country Day School is seeking an experienced co-teacher for the 2021-2022 school year to join our collaborative and innovative faculty. The right candidates will complement the strengths of WCDS and add their expertise and passion to enrich our excellent educational program and our vibrant professional learning community.
a flexible, creative, and enthusiastic approach to learning and collaborating
experienced passion for teaching children
excellent written and verbal communication skills
commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion work
facility with technology
enthusiasm about our school’s mission and philosophy
a bachelor’s degree in elementary education (masters preferred)
About Wheeling Country Day School
Wheeling Country Day School is the only independent elementary and middle school in the state of West Virginia. We have intentionally designed a culture to multiply innovation. We support teachers to create innovative programs that engage students in topics that matter and impact their lives beyond classroom walls. Students develop the intrinsic motivation to value learning and honor their passions more than grades.
Such a purposeful school culture allows students and teachers to experiment and explore in an effort to fail forward, where mistakes and missteps are inevitable but reflection and upcycling of an idea is expected. A teacher evolves into a mentor, facilitator and fellow learner with the autonomy to create engaging and resonant learning experiences.
Where our success has completely changed the game, is the work we are doing with struggling learners. In our culture of possibility, we refused to see learners as lazy or blanket them with a message to "try harder." We opened the Center for Multisensory Learning within our school to better understand and nurture the potential within those students who learn differently. Employing Orton-Gillingham and multi-sensory me...thodologies, we met students where they were and abandoned one-size-fits-all learning in favor of differentiation. Still, a diagnosis of autism or dyslexia makes the total school experience a frightening and confusing place with social and emotional landmines that are difficult to navigate and tolerate. As we know to do, we changed the environment. Learning does not happen in a vacuum, absent of the relationships a child has at school or the beliefs that a child holds about him or herself, so the total environment needs to be modified - the people, the materials, the physical surroundings, and the expectations.
From the school's leader to the youngest child each person pushes out of a comfort zone where one must humble oneself to truly learn. That's the lightning in a bottle - every individual as a learner, as a risk taker with a mission to leave something better than we found it and with the scaffolding to support possibility for all kinds of minds. We are doing this in a safe city of 26,000 people with the demographics being such that a progressive independent school should not exist. We are in a state that ranks 47th in education in some polls, yet it is possible here because of our culture.
