Students have to be engaged in what they’re doing, not just passive recipients of content, in order for us to foster the characteristics we value most: flexibility, resilience, creativity, and moral and intellectual courage. — Assistant Head for Academics Mary Fielder
Students felt that the course, as it was taught prior to the redesign, required extensive memorization of facts above all else. In many cases, students would cram for their exams and soon forget what they had learned. To address this problem, the course evolved from a survey format which offered broad historical coverage of eight to 12 regions, to a case-study format which encourages in-depth inquiry into six critical moments in global history. “With this approach, we intentionally left out certain topics in order to create time and space to dive deep into a narrower selection of content,” says Jessie. “Rather than a broad study of Chinese history from the Xia-Ming dynasties, this year’s third case study focused solely on the rise and fall of the Qin Dynasty.” Jessie’s students spent 16 class periods using that moment in history to investigate questions like: Why do some governments thrive while others fail? and How was the First Emperor able to create a foundation for a lasting Chinese state? This approach gives students the “interest, historical thinking skills, and knowledge of historical themes and patterns to pursue additional content on their own,” says Jessie. “In this age of instant access to content, we decided that it’s more important to teach students how to discover information on their own and how to thoughtfully consume the information they find, than to try to introduce them to every possible piece of content.”
PUTTING STUDENTS AT THE CENTER The Episcopal curriculum offers a multitude of teaching methods, like Jessie’s, that demonstrate a belief in the importance of student-centered learning, whereby students — guided by highly experienced faculty — are encouraged to take responsibility for their own education. In math teacher Lionel Rauth’s Algebra/ Trigonometry and Geometry classes, students engage with the Harkness method — a student-led, discussion-based approach to teaching and learning — and, according to Lionel, “discover concepts and definitions through problem-solving, rather than through lectures. Much of the learning happens in the evening when a student sits down to work through a problem set, in which the questions have been designed to encourage exploration and experimentation. Students come to class armed with new ideas about how to solve the problems, which they discuss with their classmates.”
COURSE SPOTLIGHT: Jessie George’s global history class is organized into six in-depth case studies — The Emergence of “Civilization” in River Valleys; Pericles’ Democracy vs. Augustus’ Empire; The Rise and Fall of the Qin; Early Globalization: The Silk Road and Its Travelers; Encounters in the Colonial World; Age of Revolutions — through which students explore critical moments or places in history. “With this approach, students gain the interest, historical thinking skills, and knowledge of historical themes and patterns to pursue additional content on their own.”
Lionel has watched as his students, primarily ninthand tenth-graders, have grown into “confident problem-solvers who approach learning as active exploration rather than passive reception.” Lionel acknowledges that Harkness is not the only way to teach math, nor necessarily the best way for every student to learn. “It can be especially tough for students who have only experienced math problems as evaluative
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THE MAGAZINE OF EPISCOPAL HIGH SCHOOL
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