Growing Our Capacity as Leaders

By Meg Stowe, Michelle Jones, Elaine Bernardino

The Upper School seminar experience is designed to engage students across disciplines on topics ranging from mindfulness to vetting resources for truth and bias, to fostering the mindsets which develop our student competencies. Growing our capacity to be self-aware, ethical, globally minded, and innovative requires authentic collaborations with realworld problem solvers who work to use what they know, and are able to do, in order to impact others.

This year US Seminar, Equity + Belonging, Health & Wellness, and E2 (Embedded Entrepreneurs Program) joined forces to generate a school-wide STEAM experience for students in 5th-12th grade. The result? A front-row seat and hands-on opportunity to meet leaders in action and engage founders working to address important social challenges by making STEAM fields visible, relevant, and inspirational.

Diana Perkins, founder of IncluDesign, a non-profit organization developing products which “empower individuals with disabilities around the world,” joined students in the Social Entrepreneurship Course to share her founder’s story and the process of designing for a differently-abled customer segment, including eliciting the perspectives and feedback of wheel-chair users, a process which required challenging her own assumptions in order to connect her vision of the products with the customers.

BrainCo., a Boston-based tech company working at the intersection of neuroscience, robotics, prosthetics, and mindfulness, brought handson wearable technology to RHCD classrooms including FocusCalm’s headband and NeuroMaker’s robotic arm, for a day-long experience. Students explored how these technologies strengthen and quantify our capacity for mindfulness and how FocusCalm is being implemented today by Olympic teams, Formula1 Medicine, e-sports, and police training.