Collegiate School hosts the Virginia High School Ethics Bowl each fall. Click here to learn about the qualifying event for the National High School Ethics Bowl Championship.
“In today’s times, providing a curriculum and programs that allow students and faculty to challenge their assumptions, engage with others in the broader community and push their boundaries of understanding and empathy has never been more important. I am grateful for the JK-12 impact the Powell Institute for Responsible Citizenship has on our learners." Sara Boisvert Director, Powell Institute for Responsible Citizenship Responsible Citizenship Team
Ethics challenges students to employ empathic understanding and compassionate consideration of others to critically assess situations, work through reasoned decision-making, arrive at morally sound solutions and practice those principles.
List of 3 items.
Lower School
Using the novel, Tuck Everlasting, teachers and 4th Grade students grapple with a variety of hard decisions that occur within both the story and the real world around them. Students write, blog and consider different points of view while keeping in mind Collegiate’s core values of Excellence, Love of Learning, Honor, Respect and Community.
Middle School
7th Grade students tackle ethical dilemmas in U.S. History as they study Teddy Roosevelt and the Square Deal and how to use public timber lands. Students become timber barons, workers or citizens and present their research or plans to both an ethical and sustainability panel of their peers. Both panels then present resolutions to the class.
Upper School
Upper School’s Senior Capstone: Ethics and the Engaged Citizen culminates with an Ethics Bowl, where students work collaboratively in teams to prepare for several days of in-class competition in which they present and defend positions in response to questions about real-world cases, with a heavy emphasis on critically assessing the intersection of ethics, economics and public policy decision-making.
Collegiate students in the Global Public Health senior Capstone, with the help of Director of Global Engagement and Inclusion Erica Coffey, recently began a series of Zoom meetings with the School’s seven partner schools in Italy, Spain, Ghana, India, South Africa, Morocco and China to talk about the impact of COVID-19.
During the second of three Book Gatherings in the Lower School this year, the focus was on love and kindness. Collegiate librarian Kate Featherson read “The Proudest Blue” about a young girl’s first day of wearing a hijab to school.
John Dau, Collegiate School’s Global Scholar-in-Residence, has spent time this fall talking with students across Collegiate’s three divisions. He also has remained dedicated to the John Dau Foundation (JDF), whose mission is to provide health care and nutrition programs to the citizens of South Sudan — one of the most war-torn, impoverished countries in the world.
In the Collegiate senior Capstone course, "Technohumanism: Mind, Brain, Machine," taught by Jere Williams and Dan Bartels, students developed Virtual Reality materials for 4th Grade teachers to use in their study of the American Revolution. Previously, seniors interviewed teachers and students about their needs.
Two teams of Collegiate School seniors presented opposing positions to questions about real-world cases in this afternoon’s final of the 11th annual Ethics Bowl, held in the Craigie Board Room of Sharp Academic Commons.
Collegiate 9th Graders boarded buses for the second of six visits to Richmond-area nonprofits as part of their grade-level service learning program, Community Engagement 2019-20, through which all 9th Graders volunteer once a month from now through April (excluding December) at Richmond-area nonprofits. The program builds upon the experiences provided to students through the 7th Grade service learning program, Connect Richmond, and the 8th Grade Capstone program, Envision Richmond.
The entire Collegiate School 7th Grade this week took part in Community, Challenges and Leadership, a program that reinforces the School’s core values of community, respect, honor, excellence and love of learning.
Several weeks ago, Collegiate School 4th Grader Catherine Conner was interviewed by NBC12 about how she started a Kindness Club. Immediately, Gini Bonnell, a Richmond resident, contacted Lower School counselor Kelsey Felton and asked to meet the club members.
Sonja Kapadia '17 (second from left) and Kate Partlow '17 (far right), both second-year students at the University of Virginia, each recently received HannahGrahamMemorialAwards to advance women’s health in Rwanda.
Collegiate School’s Institute for Responsible Citizenship was named last evening in honor and appreciation of the longtime support and commitment of the Powell family.
Collegiate Upper School students in Brian Ross’ history course, The United States in the 1970s, recently shared conversations with and posed questions of seven Vietnam War veterans.
In October, six Collegiate Middle School students attended The Prejudice Awareness Summit at VCU chaperoned by Carolyn Villanueva and Amasa Monroe. The Summit is designed to increase awareness, knowledge and acceptance of ethnic and cultural differences. The students returned to Collegiate and worked with Ms. Villanueva and Mr. Monroe through the fall and winter semester on a presentation summarizing their learnings that they then presented to the Middle School in assembly.
Collegiate School students in the Global Public Health senior Capstone are exploring the role of social, cultural, economic, environmental and political factors as they relate to access to health care and quality of life.
As recruits of the “Kindness Ninja Headquarters,” Collegiate School’s Junior Kindergarten classes (Sycamores and Willows) are involved in special secret missions involving being kind to others.
A group of Collegiate seniors who are taking the River City Capstone class visited the Richmond Slave Trail this week with faculty members Rhiannon Boyd and Brad Cooke in their ongoing efforts to understand the James River and its impact on the Richmond region.
Collegiate School 2nd Graders have embarked on a letter-writing campaign to secure support and sales for a product that will bring light to children and adults across the globe.
John Dau, Collegiate School’s Global Scholar-in-Residence, recently visited 9th Graders in Leigh Thompson’s and Susan Fourness-Ewell's chemistry classes to share first-hand experience with the misuse of important mineral resources and the negative impact the mining industry has on young people, the working class and communities in multiple regions in Africa.
Collegiate School students enrolled in the senior Capstone class, Sustainable Solutions to the Future of Food, spent the semester considering the following question, “How can we ensure that people have access to safe, healthy, affordable food in a way that can be both environmentally and economically sustainable?”