Capstone: Evolving the Senior Experience at Whitfield

By Larry Hays, Ed.D.

When I was hired in the spring of 1992, Whitfield had what were called May Projects. These projects offered students a short opportunity at the end of their senior spring to perform community service, do an internship, or pursue a personal project. While students enjoyed the projects, the time was limited–as was the scope of what could be accomplished. With the transition to our first rotating block schedule, a big innovation at that time, we were able to expand senior advisory time to make these projects year-long explorations, with a culminating off-campus experience.

My memory isn’t what it once was, but it seems to me that it was at Chaney's Barbecue one evening in the summer of 1992 that a few of us started brainstorming ways to combine senior advisory and the May Projects into a more meaningful, learner-centered opportunity for the seniors. Inspired by American educational thinkers and visionaries like John Dewey, Ted Sizer, Grant Wiggins, and Deborah Meier, we wanted to capitalize on the students’ own curiosity and guide them in an independent learning process. We called it the Quest Program, and over the course of the year, seniors pursued their own projects, or quests, learning about glassblowing, veterinary medicine, law, and all kinds of other topics, which they presented to peers in Senior Seminar, a course born from the expansion of advisory. Over time, we added a final exhibition asking students to share in a public forum what they had learned.

In the late 90’s the Senior Seminar course developed a robust college readiness curriculum after several exploratory trips by the senior team to meet with instructors at colleges in Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C. We visited professors and department chairs at Loyola, Northwestern, Tufts, Harvard, Boston

Where Passions Take Flight: Capstone in Action

Engineering a Better Swing : Jack Courtney ’23 merged golf and mechanical engineering to design an improved driver and putting aid.

From Intern to Attorney : Samantha Jones ’11 interned at Paule, Camazine & Blumenthal—and later joined the firm as a lawyer.

Publishing with Purpose Joel Grebler ’19 wrote multiple articles during his internship at The Jewish Light

Into the Lab: Lizzie Fagin ’19 gained hands-on experience in metallurgical analysis at Husky Corporation.

Answering the Call of the Wild: Lindsey Grigg ’18’s work at the Endangered Wolf Center sparked a career in wildlife care.

On Air, On Track : David Solomon ’02 turned his Capstone radio internship into a successful career in sports broadcasting.

University, Lake Forest, George Washington, and others. We used what was learned to redesign Senior Seminar to focus on college readiness, and we revised the exhibition, asking Seniors to provide proof of their college and lifelong learning readiness as a product of both their formal education and their off-campus Quest experiences. Inspired by this work and by my students, I myself returned to school in 2010 complete a doctorate in Higher Education Leadership with a focus on college readiness. The research I did during this time enhanced my thinking about schools–and informed much of what I’ve done at Whitfield since.

For many years, lessons in Senior Seminar included visits from professors, residential advisors, and recent graduates, as well as exercises in academic integrity, mock registration, campus mapping, personal finance, and other collegiate topics. Increasing collaboration with the office of college counseling, the wholeschool advisory curriculum, and other agenda items began to squeeze the time and resources available to support meaningful individual student scholarship toward seniors’ Quest Exhibition at the end of the year. Something had to give.

COVID-19 disrupted our ability to continue the Quest program as it was originally designed, but we seized on this disruption as an opportunity to update and improve the senior experience, creating the Senior Capstone Project. In this new iteration, we were able to revive off-campus experiences and individual exploration and provide students more time, resources, and support than in the past.

The school's current effort to lean into our experiential roots and expand our focus on authentic learning have led to the creation of a new, year-long Capstone course meant to maximize the potential of our seniors as independent scholars.

The culmination of decades of work and thinking, this next stage will be the most exciting yet, as we develop ways to build bridges between the student and the workplace, lab, field, studio, and community. As a full-credit course for all seniors, the Senior Capstone Project will place each student’s intellectual curiosity at the top of the agenda, with a guided path meant to enable them to test the limits of their skills, knowledge, and grit. The Senior Capstone Project will provide students with the skills they need to pursue their own investigations, includ- ing media literacy, innovation models, research methods, interview techniques, professional communication and presentation skills, questioning strategies, and more.

The Capstone Project, as it has for many years now, will continue to expand relationships between current students and alums, as well as both new and long-standing connections in the St. Louis community. Long term goals include development of more off-campus opportunities throughout the school year, the securing of more formal and permanent relationships with businesses and organizations, development of mentorship opportunities, and leadership among high schools that offer capstone-style programs.

Meanwhile, senior advisory time will be dedicated to college readiness and the Habits of Mind and Heart as they apply to life in and beyond Whitfield. College counseling will, as it should, have its own dedicated time in the curriculum, no longer competing with the senior advisory curriculum in a single, multi-purpose course.

As Aristotle said, “For the things we have to learn before we do them, we learn by doing them.” In other words, to learn to swim you have to get wet, and to learn to drive you have to get behind the wheel. To be an educated, productive citizen of character in a representative republic, a student must get out of their seat, off campus, and out of their comfort zone. This year’s Senior Capstone Project found Whitfield seniors starting businesses, training for a marathon, painting and sculpting, conducting research, and writing code. Next year, with a full-credit course devoted to Capstone work, the sky is the limit.