About Open Mind Ed.

Schools seeking a holistic approach to virtue education must ask: does everyone in the community agree on the school’s virtues? If so, does everyone agree on the definitions of those terms? Where are these virtues most readily found – does the science classroom promote resilience (even if not explicitly laid out in the curriculum)? Does the math classroom advance reason? Where are the unusual expressions of virtue to be found? How do expectations related to specific virtues change as students grow year by year?

Open Mind Ed. helps schools answer these questions. When the answers are clear, Open Mind Ed. can take schools even further:

Virtue education provides an opportunity not only for schools to develop a deeper understanding of their own identity, but for them to craft mission-based approaches to large, even systemic changes. A school’s virtue architecture can – and should – be the lens through which a new academic schedule is devised, a college counseling program is audited, or cross-disciplinary opportunities are constructed. Open Mind Ed. has structures to help schools evolve in keeping with their values.

Additionally, with community-connected virtue education, schools can work with other virtue-based organizations whose missions and purpose show students what true “virtue in action” might look like. Imagine a mental health non-profit pairing with a school’s PE department to use physical activity to promote introspection and self-belief. Or resources from an alternate economy organization being incorporated into science classes as a means of considering human behavior’s effects on the environment. As these relationships grow, this work may even form substantive parts of a new virtue-based curriculum. Open Mind Ed. has curricular experience to help build lessons that marry real-world good work with subject-area standards.

About Chris

Fresh out of college, he began his career at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. After seven foundational years teaching various subjects to middle- and high-schoolers, during which he also attained a master’s degree, Chris and his young family moved to London, where Chris took a job at the American School.

At ASL, Chris moved from teaching into admissions work. In 2007, Chris and his now slightly larger family returned to the US, where Chris became Director of Admissions at Hackley School in New York. Chris spent thirteen very fulfilling years at Hackley, introducing numerous changes to the admissions program designed to expand Hackley’s outreach and thus diversify its exceptional student body, helping to make it even more so.

In 2020 Chris and his wife decided to hugely expand their own horizons when Chris took up the post of Dean of Admission at Keystone Academy in Beijing, China. Chris’s time in China was as enlightening as he hoped it would be, both personally and professionally. In addition to offering numerous new professional challenges and the opportunity to meet thousands of students, parents, and colleagues from different parts of the world, Chris’s time at Keystone allowed him to travel extensively throughout China and in Asia more broadly.

Leaving Keystone in 2025, Chris and his wife relocated to the Netherlands, where Chris decided to put his lifetime of experience in education toward a new purpose. He founded Open Mind Ed. to elevate and expand discussions around learning and to build a network of schools and non-profits doing original, adaptive, even revolutionary work founded in research and intended to guide students into their best, most positive future.