• Ethics Bowl

    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.
Responsible Citizenship
“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

Responsible Citizenship

Ethics education at Collegiate empowers 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 then put principle into practice by taking action. The Collegiate community guides the students’ ethical development by: cultivating empathy as the foundation of strong relationships; providing opportunities for inquiry and discourse; maintaining clear expectations and accountability; and modeling Collegiate’s values in principled-action. Our graduates have the ethical foundation and skills to flourish as responsible citizens. Within this construct, teachers guide the students’ ethical development by building strong relationships, providing opportunities for inquiry and discourse, empowering student leadership, creating a culture of clear expectations and accountability, and above all, modeling the principles they espouse.
  • 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.

Ignite - Ethics