Prepared for Life: The Science & Art of Educational Excellence
Introduction By Kristen Klein, Associate Head of School | Illustration by Victoria Price
On a glorious almost-summer day in 2022, I sat outside with the juniors in my American Nature Writing class, eating doughnuts and discussing the ambiguous ending of Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety. Stegner’s novel addresses four characters as they struggle and succeed amid the pressures of building strong friendships and families, achieving material success through meaningful work, and stewarding creative genius. As they reflected on Stegner’s own creative genius, these two juniors talked, listened, thought and ultimately identified the novel’s central question: “What creates a life well-lived?”
As good conversations do, our discussion meandered through existential territory – two juniors grappling aloud with wanting to both get into a great college and follow a learning path that is authentically meaningful. Then one asked a pointed question: “I heard that there’s a group of teachers discussing whether to let go of AP classes. Is that happening?” I answered his question with a question: “What do you think we should do?” He went on to note that the best classes he had taken at DA were not AP (Advanced Placement) classes because he could spend time with the material, asking deeper and deeper questions. In AP, he said, the goal is memorization of a ton of content in order to pass a test. He then shared that most students forget the content of those classes as soon as they finish the exam. Like Stegner’s characters, he wanted to do meaningful work and build toward a life well lived.
For three years, I have reflected on this conversation almost daily. I hope this alumnus sees DA’s work to enhance academic excellence across 14 grades as our attempt to live more fully into our mission of helping each student on their journey to a moral, happy and productive life — a life well lived by his and by Stegner’s definition.
Our mission (unchanged since 1970) and Strategic Vision (developed in 2020 by our Board of Trustees and Administrative Team, based on comprehensive survey data from all members of our community) guide our approach to academic excellence. We are preparing our students for an unscripted future. The world does not look like it did in 2020. All we can predict about the world our students will enter as young adults is that it will not look like it does now. While we will always strive to prepare our students to thrive in the best-fit colleges (or gap years), we know that the best preparation for college AND for a life well lived remains a love of learning and the development of the skills needed to learn well. The work we’ve done to both innovate and enhance our academic program speaks directly to these two areas — sparking a love of learning and building a resilient learner’s mindset. Luckily, the two areas also prepare our students best for the next stage in their learning journey.
As colleges and universities evaluate our students for possible admission, they are looking for more “pointy” and self-motivated members of their next freshman class. Gone are the days of students who are involved in everything and checking myriad boxes; now, colleges seek students who have demonstrated a clear interest and the pursuit of that interest with increasing rigor and skill. In the pages ahead, you’ll learn more about our evolution to Advanced courses, emphasizing depth over breadth, centering student inquiry, and culminating in authentic demonstrations of learning to solve real problems for real audiences. Students will also be able to demonstrate increasing expertise through our Pathway Scholars program, or they can choose to write a senior thesis.
In order to engage rigorous learning in the Upper School, we have to help our students learn how to learn. In Middle School, we have reinvented teaching and assessment by embracing competency-based learning (CBL). In a CBL classroom, students learn how to develop expertise in a discipline. They receive specific, iterative feedback in each component skill within every academic discipline. With CBL, students build the learning muscles they will need to be a Pathway Scholar or to dive deeply into an idea that excites them.
In our Preschool and Lower School, we are focused on the building blocks of rigorous learning — reading, writing and mathematical thinking. Building on the success of the Bridges math curriculum, adapted for our youngest learners in 2018, we spent this year diving into the science of reading. Ahead, you’ll be able to read more about new approaches to phonics and reading fluency as we embrace two new curricula that will better prepare our students to learn by teaching them more effective decoding, comprehension and inference skills.
Thanks to heavy lifting by our faculty and staff, our work to enhance academic excellence at DA will make our school stronger and better at preparing students for lives in which they will thrive as problem solvers, humanitarians, entrepreneurs and innovators: roles that value creativity, teamwork and deep thinking. To equip students for these future roles, learning can no longer comprise the acquisition of facts, exam scores and badges; instead, it requires flexibility and curiosity. In our rapidly changing world — one in which technologies like generative artificial intelligence can become a helpful tool for communication and connection, or a shortcut to avoid the complexity and critical thinking that learning requires — we hope our students will be empowered to generate new solutions and write novel stories. We remain grateful for the resources and community supporting us in our pursuit of excellence and the incredible faculty and students pushing us to continue to get better each and every year.
Upper School:
With New Advanced Curriculum, ‘DA Can Be Everything That It Can Be’
Middle School:
Lower School/Preschool:
New Research-Backed Approach to Literacy Prioritizes Consistency for DA’s Youngest Learners