Shearer Receives Scholarship for Educational Experience Abroad

By BILL BELLEN
MILFORD

With the 2025 Milford Central School Capital Project underway, it seemed that Superintendent Kristen Shearer’s schedule could not get much busier. However, this assumption was proven wrong with the announcement last week that Shearer has been selected as a scholarship recipient for the annual Global Professional Learning Tour, an organized travel experience for educators designed to enhance professional development and broaden global perspective.

“I’m just thrilled to have been chosen. You know, there’s thousands and thousands of educators in our country and I’m really excited to be one of the 35 that are getting to go on this trip,” Shearer said.

This year’s tour, sponsored by EF Educational Tours and the New York Council of School Superintendents, takes recipients on an all-expenses-paid trip through Sweden, Finland, and Estonia to learn about and embrace their unique styles of education. The tour will focus on new strategies utilized by these countries and provide a firsthand experience and window into how these initiatives operate.

A statement released by MCS reads, “Shearer’s selection reflects her dedication to excellence in education and her commitment to ensuring that Milford Central School remains at the forefront of progressive learning practices. The insights gained from this experience will support future initiatives to enhance student engagement, teacher development, and overall academic achievement.”

In the lead-up to Shearer’s departure on July 7 with 34 of her colleagues, the group has had two virtual Zoom meetings in order to become acquainted with one another and to create an itinerary for their adventure abroad. They plan to visit numerous historic sites in the three countries, a highlight of which will be their visit to the Nobel Prize Museum in Sweden. Though there will certainly be many historic locales on their tour, this will not detract from the trip’s primary focus of exposing officials to other educational environments.

“We’re going to be doing some specific learning opportunities in Finland, where we are actually meeting with school personnel and spending some time in a school to understand the Finnish educational system. What I’m particularly interested in is how they gauge their learning … The way that other countries look at education is really interesting to me,” Shearer said.

European schooling is a process with many stark differences to that of the American educational system. The Finnish system is of particular interest to Shearer, as she is intrigued by the differences in student evaluations between the two countries.

“Specifically with the Finnish educational system, there’s not a lot of standardized testing. So I’m very interested in how they build their curriculum and how they know what they have taught has been learned, and from that perspective, I’m just very interested in their curriculum. I’m interested in their benchmarking and just how they project a student’s growth moving forward.

“But I’m also just ready for a new idea. I want to be enlightened by something that I can bring back here, so I don’t have any fixed kind of knowledge right now. What I want to do is just experience it and see how some of the things that they do can fit into our culture and our educational system,” Shearer continued.

With just a few short weeks to go until Shearer begins her journey overseas, there is excitement in the air over what findings she may bring back to Milford. Now that the physical transformation of MCS is in progress through the ongoing Capital Project, Shearer may well begin the push for a reinvention of the very notions of what education at the school looks like moving forward.

Only time will tell, but one thing is for certain: Shearer’s journey marks a historic milestone for not only herself, but the district as a whole.