Looking to bring a sense of “joyful exploration” to its campus, La Jolla Country Day School has brought on a new head of school in Jeff Terwin.
Now working out of an office filled with ocean-themed art, motivational posters and records from bands that he has seen live, Terwin took the reins ahead of this school year following the retirement of former head of school Gary Krahn.
A native of Michigan, Terwin’s path to education was far from linear. In fact, it went from A to Z, literally. When he started as a student at Michigan State University, he was studying advertising. But he later switched his major to zoology with plans to study marine biology.
By his junior year of college, Terwin was teaching courses to underclassmen and “absolutely loved it” he said.
“I had most of the materials handed to me [outlining] the sequence, quizzes and things like that. And I found myself sort of tweaking the labs and rewriting some of the questions on the quizzes and changing up the assignments a little bit or even the lectures and trying to make it a little more joyful and engaging,” he said. “So I was doing extra work I didn’t have to do because I really, really loved it. I saw the impact on the students, so that’s where the teaching bug began.”
While Terwin would go on to explore marine biology, he ultimately found that sharing his findings was his ion.
“I found myself translating my research to more public settings to try and educate the public about it again,” he said. “I started thinking that teaching was driving me more than the research.”
After years of sharing his work, Terwin said, “I finally said teaching is clearly in me. It’s what really drives me and energizes me.” So he started working at independent schools throughout the east coast and midwest.
While working at the North Shore Country Day School in Chicago, he was appointed Dean of Students — his first foray into istration.
“In that role you either know right away whether you really like istration,” he said with a laugh. “It’s that little litmus test. I loved it. It was a different kind of problem solving. It had that sort of consistent problem solving, and all human-based problems where you’re sitting across from somebody, and you often share the same goal, you want the students to flourish and be their best selves, but maybe sometimes those paths and how you get there might be different.”
It was also in Chicago that he met his now-wife Mia.
Soon, he was appointed the head of upper school at the Wellington School in Columbus, Ohio. After a few years, he was named head of school. In total, Terwin spent 12 years there.
But with the school “in a good place” and the Terwins children Hannah, Cooper, and Finn grown, the family considered a move to a new environment and school.
Once appointed head of school at La Jolla Country Day, Terwin said he was looking to expand learning opportunities for its students, whether that means bringing outside groups onto the school grounds or sending students outward to study with other entities.
“Can we build even more partnerships beyond our campus in meaningful ways,” he posed. “Where students can contribute and connect to outside organizations and learn about the real world? And what kinds of real problems are out there and how do you solve those problems or approaches? It’s helping students to learn how to think, not what to think.”
And guiding it all is a concept he developed called “joyful exploration” which he said means embracing the joy in a challenging field, both for students and teachers.
“Teaching in general is really hard work, no matter what school you’re in,” he said. “It’s maybe the most important work in the world. … So we’re trying to encourage students, faculty and s to see that the gift of being in a school is that there are moments around every corner that allow you to laugh and smile and elevate someone else, or be a part of something that maybe was surprising to you, or study a topic that then creates these ‘wow’ moments.”
For Terwin, that has meant taking time to read or play with the school’s youngest students. Or, when the teachers and faculty had their back-to-school meeting, they were asked to have “walk up music” like athletes, as played by a DJ.
“The idea is being an explorer, which I think is really impactful as an educational model,” he said. “Then the joyful piece [comes because] it’s too easy to get distracted from the joy. So it’s just trying to put things through that lens. Education is serious business, there are significant learning outcomes. We want to help our students be better thinkers and better problem solvers and improve the world if they can in small and big ways.”
