Fountain Valley School announces this year's recipients of its major professional development awards and Round Square Teacher Exchange.

Each summer, a small group of Fountain Valley School faculty members steps away from the classroom with a purpose: to travel somewhere unfamiliar, ask harder questions, and return with something new to offer students. This year's professional development award recipients represent exactly that spirit.

DeAnna Sandoval | Ballantine Award | Greece

DeAnna Sandoval will travel to Greece to immerse herself in the ancient world, studying Greek history, philosophy, government, art, and culture firsthand among the sites and landscapes where so much of Western thought took root. DeAnna hopes to bring back richer curricular connections for her history teaching and to explore the possibilities for a future FVS Interim to Greece. For students, that means a teacher returning with not just new knowledge, but new ways of making that knowledge feel alive and deeply relevant.

Jed Haupt | Robert D. Cole Family Professional Development Award | Pacific Northwest

Jed Haupt will travel to Washington and British Columbia to explore Indigenous culture, community, and ecological stewardship through direct engagement with the Kyuquot/Checleseht First Nations and other cultural programs throughout the region. The work is a natural extension of his teaching of the American West and it may also lay the groundwork for a future student Interim. Students will feel the impact in courses that engage the American West not as a subject to be surveyed, but as a living story still being written by the people who call it home.

Jessica Smith | Released Time Award | Cognitive Science and the Art of Teaching

Jessica Smith's project takes a different kind of journey… inward, and into the research. She will spend her time exploring the connections between cognitive science, neurobiology, attention, and learning, with a particular focus on how practices like mindfulness and nervous system regulation can support student focus, resilience, and academic readiness. This work sits at the intersection of who students are and how they learn, and it has the potential to shape not just Jessica's own classroom, but curriculum design and teaching practices across the school.

Nicole Echales | Round Square Teacher Exchange | Scotch Oakburn College, Australia

As incoming Science Department Chair, Nicole Echales will participate in the Round Square Teacher Exchange at Scotch Oakburn College in Tasmania, collaborating with science faculty and school leaders to explore approaches to rigor, curriculum design, and student engagement. Round Square exchanges are built on a simple but powerful premise: that great schools can learn from each other. Nicole will return to FVS with fresh perspectives on what excellent science education can look like.

These awards exist because of the generosity of those who believe in the people who teach here — the Ballantine and Cole families among them. Their support means that a teacher can walk the Athenian agora, sit with an Indigenous elder, explore the neuroscience of attention, or trade ideas with colleagues on the other side of the world — and bring something back that no curriculum guide can provide.