Responsible Citizenship at Collegiate School

Responsible Citizenship at Collegiate School Fall 2015 Striving to be caring and engaged learners is a tradition at Collegiate. What’s new is our intentional inclusion of the familiar tenets of character, service, knowledgeable and ethical decision-making, and more into a RESPONSIBLE CITIZENSHIP curriculum.

For the last century, Collegiate School students have distinguished themselves as strong scholars and community leaders. They’ve excelled academically, volunteered, traveled, managed budgets,

administrators with opportunities to build a cohesive curriculum that enriches the School’s academic

“ This initiative brings together these eight vital areas of school life under one umbrella to ensure that each grade level builds on the foundation of the previous one, supporting students’ growth from Junior Kindergarten through 12th Grade.”

program and allows for collaborative innovation inside and beyond our JK-12th Grade classrooms.

Clare Sisisky Director of Responsible Citizenship

raised awareness of ethical and inclusion issues, been social entrepreneurs and worked to improve the impact of our lives on our planet.

Rather than leave good citizenship up to chance, as we begin our next 100 years, we are taking a thoughtful approach to embedding into the Collegiate experience eight elements, of Responsible Citizenship, which we refer to as pillars. The pillars are global engagement, service learning, economic literacy, inclusion, ethics, civic engagement, sustainability and entrepreneurship.

Tying these important components together has provided Collegiate faculty members and

Our Mission Responsible Citizenship at Collegiate School empowers engaged, R E SPONSIBLE

Citizenship

contributing citizens by nurturing students’ compassion, creativity and purpose.

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How Responsible Citizenship is Linked to Learning RESPONSIBLE CITIZENSHIP is a big term, but in the day-to-day life of our students, it is exemplified by their tangible execution of our school motto — Minds that seek. Hearts that serve.

Here are the eight pillars of Responsible Citizenship and how we define and infuse them into the School’s curriculum. Brief examples are featured to provide a sense of what our students experience, but merely skim the surface of the various ways the pillars enrich their learning.

ECONOMIC LITERACY at Collegiate provides students with foundations in both economics education and financial literacy, touching on choices, economic systems, trade and economic resources.

FOR EXAMPLE — The 3rd Grade’s Classroom Economy mimics real-world economics as students participate in a mock economy and apply for jobs, earn salaries, produce goods and pay taxes to fund classroom improvements. Spending too much at Market Day may mean coming up short for next month’s rent, but those who save effectively have an opportunity to buy their desks and live rent-free. The goal of this activity is to create economic thinkers who have a greater understanding and appreciation of the economic realities that govern our daily lives.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP provides a multidisciplinary framework, a laboratory for incubating ideas, an expanded set of partnerships, and a broader, more active civic engagement.

FOR EXAMPLE — The Middle School’s Golden Cougar Bank and Entrepreneurship Club have teamed up to offer a collaborative activity called Cougar Enterprises. The group follows a strong entrepreneurial curriculum that includes a trip to Richmond’s 5th District headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank and visits from successful entrepreneurs and prominent business leaders who share their stories and answer questions about the realities of starting and running businesses. Throughout the year, Cougar Enterprises hosts four Middle School markets, where classmates can shop for handmade crafts and foods. The student vendors must rent space at the markets, then decide where to donate that revenue. Choosing an organization to receive the funds is a useful exercise in considering compatibility of missions and meaningful philanthropy.

INCLUSION at Collegiate means consistent work across all areas of school life and curriculum to ensure that all members of our community feel fully respected and valued, and that our students develop the skills to thrive and lead in a diverse society.

FOR EXAMPLE — The 5th Grade History curriculum focuses on ancient civilizations, including the basic tenets of the five major world religions. Students visit places of worship in Richmond to learn more about Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. The World Religion Assembly Speaker Series at Middle School assemblies throughout the year reinforces this focus by informing students about multicultural traditions. Recent yearlong themes of the series have included “Prayer,” “Pilgrimage” and “Religion and the Arts.”

SERVICE LEARNING employs a teaching strategy that integrates meaningful service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience.

FOR EXAMPLE — Upper School students taking AP Spanish work in groups to help run the Saturday Academy, a mentorship program for Spanish-speaking students at Oak GroveBellemeade Elementary School in South Richmond. Our students help plan the curriculum based on community needs and, while at Oak Grove-Bellemeade, they practice their Spanishspeaking skills by interacting with the students. Back on campus at Collegiate, they spend class time writing extensively on AP themes around family, work life, immigration and culture, based on their interactions with the Oak Grove-Bellemeade students. Taking the service element a step further, our students also work in small groups as volunteer mentors with the Oak Grove-Bellemeade students throughout the school year.

ETHICS education at Collegiate empowers students to employ empathic understanding and compassionate consideration of others to critically assess situations, work through reasoned decisionmaking, arrive at morally sound solutions and put principle into practice by taking action.

FOR EXAMPLE— Using the novel Tuck Everlasting, 4th Grade teachers and students grapple with a variety of hard decisions that occur within both the story and the real world around them. They write, blog, debate and discuss complex issues as they consider different points of view while keeping in mind Collegiate’s core values of Excellence, Love of Learning, Honor, Respect and Community.

How Responsible Citizenship is Linked to Learning (cont.)

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT is embraced at Collegiate as individual and collective action by student citizens to promote civic literacy, address issues, and build community locally and globally.

FOR EXAMPLE — The 8th Grade capstone experience, Envision Richmond, fosters collaboration, empathy, creativity and problem-solving skills as they use the city as their classroom. Using the design thinking process, teams of students address challenges the city is facing by learning about them and proposing solutions that they present to community leaders. Eighth Graders build on these skills throughout the year, and the program concludes with a school day dedicated to working on student-designed activities related to the topics they’ve researched.

SUSTAINABILITY involves valuing and understanding the interconnectedness of human and natural systems and taking action so that these systems may thrive.

FOR EXAMPLE — Sea creatures like fish, sharks, whales and dolphins and the health of the world’s waters are studied during the 2nd Grade study of the ocean, which includes a visit to the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Norfolk. Lower School engineering teacher Liz Clayton helps students follow one drop of water from our campus all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, using Google Earth to illustrate the impact we have on the faraway ocean. The projectbased-learning aspect of the study includes individual research into “I wonder” questions that are answered online and with expertise from other 2nd Grade teachers. To wrap up their work, the 2nd Graders share their completed projects with fellow classmates, teachers and administrators at a showcase followed by reflection on their work and its meaning.

“ To navigate well our highly connected and diverse world, we believe our young people will need the type of skills and experiences that are at the core of the Responsible Citizenship initiative.”

Steve Hickman Head of School

GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT focuses on providing students with skills that encourage them to view the world as interconnected, with an emphasis on the importance of continual awareness of global conditions and perspectives, including ways to collaboratively solve problems.

FOR EXAMPLE — Our International Emerging Leaders program focuses on cross-cultural communication, global awareness, using design-thinking to solve problems, and leadership development. The program has three different offerings, each with a unique approach to these common learning objectives.

■ The International Emerging Leaders: Americas program focuses on the United States

and Central America. Students engage in an in-depth exploration of Mexico and neighboring Central American countries, as they prepare to represent Collegiate at the International Youth Dialogue hosted by Colegio Carol Baur in Mexico City in early February.

■ The International Emerging Leaders: Asia program engages students in a comprehensive

collaboration with our partner school in Yangzhou, China. This program focuses on examining the economic ties between the U.S. and China, but also explores current political, cultural, and ethical issues arising from an in-depth study of this topic through discussion, film, and a series of guest speakers.

■ The annual International Emerging Leaders Conference takes place in October each year.

The conference focuses on the global economy and the environment, and students from 12 countries around the world gather to work collaboratively, hear from prominent scholars and business leaders on this topic, and design innovative solutions. The conference also includes programs designed to help delegates share and learn about each other’s cultures and traditions, and share with students throughout the Collegiate community.

An extension of the International Emerging Leaders program this fall has been the opportunity for some of our Upper Schoolers to Skype with students at our partner school in Beirut, Lebanon and collaborate on a relief project for students who are living in Syrian refugee camps in Beirut.

To read more about how these eight pillars are being woven into the daily lives of Collegiate students, visit the Responsible Citizenship area of our School website, under Programs.

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Citizenship Through an intentional focus on Responsible Citizenship, the Collegiate community strives to live our school motto — Minds that seek. Hearts that serve.

IGNITE Ignite: The Responsible

As our founder, Helen Baker, wrote to the first Collegiate graduates in 1919, “... Above everything else, I would have you live for humanity’s sake. I would have you good citizens in the widest sense.”

Citizenship Blog offers

This early imperative remains essential as we prepare our students to make a difference in

insight into how our initiative

the world that awaits them.

is coming to life in the curriculum of Collegiate.

By highlighting various examples of student projects and faculty reflections

From Our Students’ Perspective …

across the eight pillars, IGNITE both informs and inspires the Collegiate community and beyond to continue to engage young people in brainstorming and problem-solving as a vehicle for powerful learning.

Visit the IGNITE blog by clicking here.

An International Emerging Leader Conference Student Delegate: “ It’s been fascinating and rewarding to meet so many people my age who come from different backgrounds and have different stories to share and different perspectives that aren’t represented in the media.”

An 8th Grade Envision Richmond Participant: “ Before Envision Richmond, most of my thoughts have been about innovating the entire world, but I never took into account the importance of local issues. I feel that now I can realize how creating a better local community is be a large step towards creating a better world.”

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