Learning with a Vision

Within the Collegiate School there is a strong community that extends well beyond the Cougar campus. This extension is part of the founding philosophy that exists in each Collegiate student — a love of learning and a commitment to service and citizenship — and encourages the students to become lifelong learners, citizens who are always looking to enrich the lives of others in their community.  

Collegiate’s Capstone program, guided by the School’s commitment to responsible and compassionate citizenship, enhances students’ classroom learning in a real-world context, allowing them to apply their academic knowledge to larger communities. “Capstone provides the students with such enriched learning opportunities with so many real-world connections,” Jamie Chambers, the 4th Grade Teacher who coordinated the Lower School Capstone, says. “We are so fortunate at Collegiate to be able to provide and implement programs such as Capstone to enhance the students’ learning experiences.”

The Capstone program is offered in the final year of each division of the School — 4th Grade, 8th Grade and 12th Grade — and creates opportunities for our students that help them prepare for the future. Each Capstone has, at its core, an essential question or challenge, one that empowers students to use their cumulative learning. 

The Capstones build on other projects in Collegiate’s curriculum, allowing students to apply their skills to the larger world. Through the Collegiate experience, our students grow not only as Collegiate Cougars but as citizens of the world. 

 

In Heather Garnett’s 4th Grade classroom, one group of students, who call themselves the Creative Cougars, reimagined the outdoor space by Nunnally Hall and the Watt Library to include a shaded space for reading and writing, a coy pond and a ping pong table. 

Another group — this one working under the name of Cougar Doers — reimagined a different space near the Upper School with plans to implement a pavilion with extra chairs and a birdhouse to create a calming atmosphere conducive to studying.  

These inventive and functional plans were the culmination of Collegiate School’s 4th Grade Capstone project, Envision Collegiate, where students worked in teams to develop solutions to the question of how to redesign outdoor spaces at the School. 

The 4th Graders designed their prototypes after meeting with students from the Middle and Upper School, a practice that allows students to connect with their peers and sharpen their interviewing skills. From there, the students interpreted the needs of the user, the Middle and Upper School students, in order to design a space that would accommodate their needs. “We worked to create a prototype of what we thought the space could be and created it to meet the user’s need,” one 4th Grader says.  

By working together in groups, the students practiced using language from the civil dialogue critical listening process: stop, think and choose how you might react to others’ ideas. The groups had to work through the systems of making decisions as a team. “We all came up with ideas and we had to pick one idea and draw it so that we would know what we wanted to build for our prototype,” one student explains.  

The students then put those ideas into practice, building structures out of cardboard boxes and other recycled materials that they would later present to Collegiate faculty members. This process makes students’ thinking visible and encourages them to adjust their process based on feedback. “I liked the experimentation process,” says Niko Hough, a 4th Grade student, “because I could really just let my mind go loose and create something that we could all work on as a group and then present it.” 

Envision Collegiate fosters a broader understanding of the Collegiate community and helps establish students’ skills of problem-solving, empathy building and leadership development. The project gives the 4th Graders the tools they will need going forward as both students and citizens.

“It is obvious to me how invested the Lower School students are in sharing their thinking, and that they are invested in the ideas of their peers as well,” says Rhiannon Boyd, Director of JK-12 Capstones. “The students have the tools to understand the challenges people face, to use human connection to deepen their understanding of how best to solve problems and then how to visualize their thinking to share those ideas to inspire action.”

As students advance through the divisions, their mindsets expand with each Capstone, and they continue to complement the skills they learned in previous classes.

In April, Collegiate School 8th Graders wrapped up their yearlong Envision Richmond Capstone, an experience that immerses the students in the local community with an intensive leadership and civic engagement curriculum.

With real-world challenges that connect the students with professionals in the Richmond community, Cougars learn to think together to make our city stronger. “It’s a great project,” says Wendi Moss, who is the Envision Richmond coordinator. “Students recognize their importance in both the Collegiate community and the community of Richmond.” 

Throughout the year, the 8th Graders worked with local organizations to better understand the climate of the community. Collegiate partnered with 70 organizations in Richmond, including The Valentine Museum, Bike Walk RVA, Virginia Rehabilitation Center for the Blind and Vision Impaired, and VCU Outdoor. 

From there, once the students developed a deeper understanding of the city of Richmond, they began to design projects to implement around the city. “The best part about Envision Richmond is when we get in our subgroups to create our prototypes,” one student says. “We didn’t have many materials, so everyone had to get creative and that brought us closer together.”

It’s a project of focused collaboration, one that encourages the students to think beyond their campus. “The whole challenge of Envision Richmond is to study a topic, identify a need and create a solution,” Moss says. 

Some of those solutions established by our Cougars are going to be integrated into the Richmond community. One project, for example, explored the issue of disabled peoples’ access to the James River. The students devised a solution to install a swing that would safely place people into the river. The partners that the students worked in collaboration with for this project loved this idea and are now looking to install some of the swings in local parks. So, while the students learn to work with real-world professionals, those same professionals often learn just as much from Collegiate students. “The project is mutually beneficial in that the partners have something to offer us and our students have something to offer them,” Moss says. 

Ultimately, though, Envision Richmond fosters collaboration, empathy, creativity, communication and problem-solving techniques so students feel better equipped to improve the city around them. “We are learning together to make our city stronger,” Moss says, “because it’s important to know that as 8th Graders they can still change their community and can still have ideas that matter.”

 

At the foundation of Envision Your World, Collegiate School’s signature Senior Capstone program, is a commitment to responsible citizenship, leadership and collaboration with the community beyond the School’s campus. That commitment remains the same, but the projects, like so many aspects of this school year, were influenced by the pandemic. 

Each Capstone project has an essential question or challenge that encourages students to apply their cumulative learning to the real world. This spring, 12th Grade students were offered a variety of programs to choose from: Global Public Health, IEL Americas, Sustainable Solutions to the Future of Food, Mindful Leadership, and The River City. The Global Public Health Capstone asked students to explore ways to address and alleviate the challenges of vaccinating the vulnerable populations in Richmond. “The students’ projects in this Capstone looked at global trends in public health,” says Rhiannon Boyd, Director of JK-12 Capstones. “And they applied that knowledge to this particular pandemic so that they could better understand the situation we’re living in now and help those that might need it.” 

To consider the best ways to address public health concerns within the various demographics of Richmond, the 12th Grade students collaborated with Tyler Agee, a 2009 Collegiate alumnus who now serves as director of Health Access at Bon Secours Health System, and Madelyn Eubanks, who also works at Bon Secours. 

The challenge for students is to take those lessons they’ve learned through research and apply them, using design thinking, which approaches a problem by addressing the needs of the user, to the real world. “This is why design thinking matters,” Boyd says, “because when you start designing ideas by understanding who is going to be using your design, you really hit your target.” 

And hit the target they did. Students presented Agee with outreach plans for spreading helpful information on the vaccine and creating vaccination sites. Agee commended the students on their plans of outreach. “Your thoughtfulness, innovation and comprehension of the social determinants is truly impressive,” he tells the students. “You’ve fully captured the important role that trust plays in behavior change and healthcare adoption.”

And while the Capstone project empowers students to engage with the community, the community similarly engages with the students — often taking the students’ ideas and putting them into practice. “I’m taking all of your ideas back to my team as we continue to target these vulnerable communities,” Agee says. “I hope you consider future careers in public health.”

Throughout the three levels of the Capstone, Collegiate nurtures the enduring characteristics of the scholar-citizen-leader that exists in all aspects of the School’s academics. The powerful vision of the Capstone program is to encapsulate all of Collegiate’s values and integrate them into the three culminating projects, enriching the students’ futures.