Meet Mo Copeland
Mo Copeland become head of school at OES on July 1, 2011. For the previous 10 years, she had been head of Saint George's, a K-12 school in Spokane, Washington, and before that she taught physics for 18 years in Seattle. Mo and her husband, Chris, have two sons, Daniel at Reed College and Nick at Lewis & Clark College. They also have a dog named Kootenay. (Interview conducted on December 18, 2010)
What are you most looking forward to at OES?
The people. What inspires me to do the work I do is doing it with really smart, really passionate people. I’m going to have that in abundance at OES. The community is truly inquiry-based, the adults as well as the kids, and I love that.
As a head of school, do you still see yourself as a teacher?
A. I consider myself having been a career teacher. I taught for 18 years, and I still love working with kids. I would be happy to directly teach them, especially in physics, which is my field, but I am more interested in coaching and teaching adults. I consider my job as a head to be very much a teaching role. “Headmaster” literally used to mean the master teacher who became the director of all the teachers and was revered as the head teacher or master teacher. Independent schools have become more professional so that the head teacher is not necessarily the person running the school anymore.
How has your experience prepared you for this move to OES?
I’ll be asking a lot of questions trying to understand the specifics of the OES community, but I definitely feel that having a long history as a teacher gives me a good understanding of what life in the classroom is like. I have been a head of school for 10 years, and there’s nothing like working with parents on controversial issues to get you comfortable with leadership. My husband says, “You have a really thick skin now” (laughs), and I think in a good way, not a bad way, in that I can handle the slings and arrows that come my way and not overreact and not take them personally. My years of experience have given me a sense of balance and sense of judgment.
Having been an upper school teacher, do you feel pretty comfortable in your understanding of the educational challenges of younger students?
Absolutely. That was a big learning curve for me when I took over at Saint George’s because I had been a high school teacher my whole career so I didn’t have a lot of experience with lower schools, and I had to get up to speed quickly. It helped that at the same time my kids were going through the lower school, and so I could learn about the curricular issues and how the teaching works there. When I was looking for my next step, there was no question that I was looking for a K-12 school. I love the continuity of the education that kids get when they are at a K-12 school. What happens in the lower school is crucially important. Lower school teachers are magical, the ones who can teach lower school year after year and be fresh and energetic and love the kids.
What are some of the most important things students need to learn in the Lower School?
The curiosity, the love of learning, the willingness to ask questions and get engaged—that’s what has to happen. Kids have to love school early on. When I walk around OES, I see kids loving what they are doing. They love all the challenges teachers put in front of them. They get very engaged, ask their own questions, and create their own ideas. They’re not doing rote work. They are learning what they have to learn in order to have the tools, but there is so much engagement starting in the Lower School that plays itself out in the Middle and Upper Schools with the inquiry methods in teaching science and math and English and history that everyone seems to believe in.
Another very important thing students need to learn is resilience. You can see what Matt (Fernandez) and Akash (Krishnan) have accomplished (in the Siemens Competition), and it is extraordinary, but only they know how many steps backward they had to take, how many false leads they had, and how they had to keep coming back and trying over and over and over. That is the most crucial thing this generation is going to need--resilience, the ability to handle setbacks well.
In your experience as an undergraduate, first at Harvard and then at Reed College, what differences did you see between those two institutions?
Harvard is a big, huge, research university. Its reason for being isn’t the undergraduates. I think it’s better now, but I had all teaching assistants rather than professors. At Reed, the professors are actually teaching and they are master teachers. They are not just doing research but are honing their craft of teaching. I just found the contrast unbelievable. I also found the kids to be really different. The kids at Reed, like the kids at OES, wanted to be engaged. That just wasn’t the case at Harvard. It was more, “I got in, now I can slack off.” There was a lot of emphasis on sports and just getting through, and nobody sat around and talked about the books they were reading.
Was physics already on your radar when you were at Harvard or is that something you morphed into?
I didn’t take physics in high school. When I was at Harvard I continued in math and took no physics. When I left Harvard I spent a year in Alaska. I lived in the middle of nowhere for most of the winter. I was house-sitting for folks and taking care of their sled dogs. The one thing you have in Alaska in the winter is time, and I took advantage of that. I was right on the train route between Fairbanks and Anchorage, and you could sign up with the Fairbanks library and once a week they would drop off 10 books and pick up your 10 books, but you couldn’t pick what books. You could tell them categories, so I said I was interested in math and physics. I ended up with all these physics books, and I started reading about it and thought, this is really what I want to study. So when I went back to school I became a physics major.
You have said that you like to be outdoors. What do you think about while you are there?
I do a lot of my processing when I’m out in the woods, or if I’m in town I’ll jog or swim or whatever. It’s amazing how much mental processing my job and my life require, figuring out how personalities work out or how pieces fit together—what’s the plan for this and what’s the plan for that. So I think a lot about work, actually, but it’s in a very relaxed way.
We do a lot of walks with our dog. If we can’t get out to the mountains, we’ll do a two- to three-hour walk on the weekend. But what I really like is being out for a couple of nights so I feel like I am totally gone. There’s no cell phone and no email, and we wake up in our little tent and cook our food and then we have the whole day to just explore. That’s what I like the most. This summer we did a two-week kayak trip up in the Queen Charlotte Islands. That was fabulous. All you’re doing is thinking about your life on the water. You have all these little daily challenges, where you’re going to find water to drink and where you’re going to camp that night. It’s very relaxing just to have little daily things to think about. It’s very different from school where you constantly have lots of big stuff in mind.
Does your whole family go with you?
We’ve done a lot of trips with our kids. We’ve taken our kids even when they were really little. We’ve taken them backpacking and kayaking. I made special spray skirts so they could sit in our laps in the kayaks and we could go on long kayaking trips. This past summer was the first time they were both doing other things so we didn’t go with them.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. My family lived in Woods Hole, which is where the scientific community is. My dad was an oceanographer. My parents were really into sailing, so we did a lot of cruising in their 27- -foot sloop. I get motion sickness, so as soon as I discovered the mountains, backpacking was a lot more comfortable for me than being on the ocean. I credit my parents with getting me comfortable with being in the outdoors.
I went to a big public high school. At the time there weren’t any other options. My mom was a career educator, and she was on the local education board and the regional one, and she ended up on the state board of education, so she was passionate about public education, so even if there had been an option I think she would have kept her own kids in the public school. I think it’s one of the reasons that when I got to Harvard I wasn’t ready for it. I didn’t have the writing skills that OES kids have when they graduate, and I didn’t have the discipline for the volume of work that kids from independent schools are comfortable dealing with. My own kids, who went to Saint George’s, are now in college and they know how to do college. They’re comfortable with the expectations, work load and level of engagment.
Is that why you became involved with independent schools when you became an educator yourself?
It was a big part of it. I was impressed with what the independent school world was able to do with kids because of course at Harvard you run into all these kids who have gone to Andover and Exeter and know how to get it done. The other reason was that I really wanted to teach my field, which was physics, and in a lot of public schools you weren’t able to teach your actual discipline because you were disciplining or you had to teach math instead of physics. The independent school world allowed me to teach physics to small classes of kids and really get engaged with the material, so it was a good fit for me.
What do you think some of the challenges are for independent schools?
I think the biggest challenge for independent schools is not to price themselves out of the middle class. We’ve been on this decades-long trend of increasing tuition more than inflation, so more and more of people’s discretionary income is required for them to send their kids to school. I don’t see a solution to it because that’s also what it takes to run an independent school, but I think we have to be really, really creative during the next decade about how to fund our schools so the middle class can access them. When Saint George’s was started 50 years ago, the families who founded the school said they didn’t want a school just for kids from wealthy families. All the founders were well off and were able to build the school, but they said their kids wouldn’t truly be educated unless they had the experience of being around all different kinds of people. So Saint George’s has had a commitment to a diverse campus. I worry about independent schools being able to keep a diverse student body, which is important for the quality of education for everybody.
How do you see the balance between OES day students and boarding students and how that weaves into the richness of the experience?
That is part of the diversity that I am so looking forward to. The whole international piece that OES is able to do is extraordinary. It’s an incredibly diverse program with people from many different parts of the world. OES is doing its boarding program right, and keeping that going is really important.
Have you spent much time abroad?
When I was a senior in high school I spent a semester abroad in France. That was a challenge. It was not an easy experience for me. I’d never lived away from home, I was very shy, and although I’d had French for about six years in public school, I could speak hardly a word. But it taught me a lot about myself, and it made me stronger in terms of what I could endure. By the end, I had really good relationships with my host family and I had made some close friends among the group I had gone over there with. The other substantial travel I have done was in the 1980s when a friend and I spent six weeks in China. We had to create the trip all ourselves. It was way pre-Internet. We chose six different places we wanted to go, and when we got to each place, the first thing we had to figure out was how to leave because it sometimes took two or three days to figure out which train we would go on and when the train left and stand in line to get our tickets. It was quite an adventure because of course neither of us spoke any Chinese. I’ve been back to China since to recruit Chinese teachers, and it’s totally different. There’s English under a lot of the symbols now and many people speak English, but back then it was not easy.
Did that experience affect your perspective on the need for students to be globally educated so they can successfully travel to or live in another country?
I think all of the issues with Africa are going to be as world-changing and as difficult to handle in the next couple of decades as the current reality with all of Asia changing and growing economically. There are enormous issues there, and as the African countries begin to evolve and their economics start changing, that’s going to change the face of the globe, too. So I’m happy that OES is embracing recruiting students from all parts of the world and providing travel opportunities to different continents. A sense and understanding of the world’s global and cultural issues will be crucial to our students throughout their lifetimes.
What other changes do you see that students will have to be prepared for?
Obviously technology and communications, which has made the world smaller, are going to be important. The way kids engage and use communications is so different than how we did—how they use it and think about it and connect to people. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Do you have a Facebook page, and do you go on it every day?
I do have a Facebook page, but I don’t post a lot to it. I consider it to be a professional page. If you Google me, that’s going to come up, and I want it to be very professional, so I don’t put a lot of personal stuff on it. But I find that there are a lot of people who only communicate with me through Facebook, so I think it’s important to have a page.
Do you consider yourself an early adopter of technology?
Being a little bit of a nerd and a physics person, I can quickly figure out a lot of technology. I did a lot of lab work over the summers when I was in college, and after college I worked at the linear accelerator in Stanford for a while, so I have used equipment and tools and technology all the time. I did one of the very first theses at Reed that had a computer simulation in it. So I’ve always been comfortable with it, but I also get how it can completely consume your time and your energy when you’re an early adopter because you’re figuring it all out and you’re trying to get used to it. So I choose to wait and see what’s really going to fly and not spend my time until it’s really taken off.
Could you tell us more about your family, about your husband, Chris, and the boys?
Chris got his degree in biology at Dartmouth, and then he attended the University of Washington for graduate school, which is where I met him. He was working on his master’s in Chinese. His science background and the Asian connection set him up beautifully for a career in the tech transfer industry that was just beginning in Seattle. He would catch on to what was happening in the science labs at the University of Washington and then figure out how it could be turned into a product or marketed internationally. So he was doing that and I was working at a school, and then I pulled up all of our roots and made us move to Spokane for the job opportunity at Saint George’s. Our kids were really little so at that point Chris decided to be a stay-at-home dad, and it has been great. I feel so blessed. After a long day at work, I come home, and the house is all lit up, it’s all warm, the kids are busily doing things, you can smell the wonderful meal coming … I feel so lucky! And I think he’s truly been happy doing it. He likes taking care of the boys and the dog, and he plans trips and makes sure all of our gear is ready. I think now with the boys gone and us moving to Portland, he might look around for a way to get engaged outside of the house. In Spokane he volunteered a lot for the land trust and got very involved in land use issues, and I could see that happening here. He has also coached chess at Saint George’s ever since our oldest son Daniel asked him to teach him to play in fourth grade—he has had many winning players and teams over the years, including fourth place in the nation when Daniel was in Middle School.
Daniel has always loved math, and I was so thrilled that he went to a liberal arts college (Reed), that he deliberately made that choice because it’s helped him find other things that interest him. He’s done a ton of philosophy and a ton of writing. It’s really helped expand his repertoire academically, so it’s been a great fit for him.
Nick is in his first year at Lewis & Clark and doesn’t quite know what he wants to pursue. With his brother, we knew when he was 2 that he was interested in math and science, but Nick is more figuring things out. He’s a totally sweet kid. He never minded me being the head of the school. He would always come by the office and put his feet up and chat. He just thought it was great and often wrangled a soda from my assistant.
Are you an avid reader? What kind of books do you like to read?
I have brought along a few books I’ve read lately. These are some of the books that were lying around my house. I read every day. I love to read. (The books Mo brought are listed in the sidebar on the right, along with her comments about them.)
Tell us about your dog.
You can ask my husband about the dog. His name is Kootenay, and he is a yellow lab, a field lab, so he’s big and lean, a hundred-pound dog. Some people have dogs that will sit under their desks all day long, but this would not be that dog. He’ll spend time on campus because Chris will bring him to campus, but he won’t sit around the office all day.
Do you have a hero or a mentor in your career?
I have really been blessed by having the right mentor at the right time. I had a math teacher in high school who was so encouraging and pushed us really, really hard, and he did all kinds of different things. He didn’t just do normal math, he brought in all these different projects. So he was the right guy at the right time. Then I had some teachers at Reed that I would say the same thing about. Then my very first colleague that I taught physics with, a guy named Ed Shore, just took me under his wing and taught me everything he knew about teaching and about physics and about how you work with kids. When I took over at Saint George’s, I had a board chair who did the same thing. I was totally green and she was really clear about what worked well and what didn’t work well, and she would tell me when I was on the wrong track. So I feel like I’ve had the right person at the right time for what I needed. I feel like I’ve been really lucky that way.
