Mary Dyer came to Clarebourne after twelve years in early childhood and elementary education, including seven years as a lead teacher and literacy coordinator at the Riverside Country Day School in Vermont and four years as Lower School Dean at the Weston Academy outside Boston. She holds a B.S. in Early Childhood Education from Lesley University and an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Vermont, where her graduate research focused on the relationship between oral language development and early writing acquisition.
At Clarebourne, she oversees the full K–4 program — curriculum, faculty development, family communication, and the daily life of the Lower School community. She redesigned the division’s literacy scope and sequence in 2014 in collaboration with the English department, aligning the Lower School’s approach to reading instruction with the analytical habits students will need in the Middle School. She also created the Lower School’s family advisory structure, in which each homeroom teacher meets individually with every family three times per year — not just when something is wrong.
She is a quiet evangelist for the proposition that the foundation years are the most consequential years in a child’s education, and that they are consistently underestimated by schools that reserve their most serious pedagogical attention for older students.
“People sometimes assume that rigor begins in the Middle School. I’d argue it begins in Kindergarten — the moment we decide whether we’re going to take a five-year-old’s question seriously or move on because we have a schedule to keep. Everything else follows from that decision.”
Clarebourne since 2009