By our Smarty friends at Providence Day School
Middle School at Providence Day doesn’t mean traditional end-of-year exams; instead, students are spending the school year learning what it means to put together a “capstone project.”
Five years ago, Middle School leadership put in place capstone projects to help students strengthen skills essential to a changing world. Providence Day has outlined these skills in its “PD Passport,” which is a template for teaching students to become global citizens. They include: creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, information literacy, media literacy, and information and communication technology literacy.
“We moved to this collaborative, design forward, critical thinking project as an end of year opportunity for our students to demonstrate the skills they’ve gained over the course of the year,” says Lee Tappy, Head of Middle School at Providence Day. “The capstone projects also focus heavily on social responsibility, which is an important part of our mission statement, and they also help students focus on the impact they can have on their own communities and the larger global community.”
Beginning in sixth grade and progressing through seventh and eighth, students learn problem solving skills by experiencing capstone projects through a slightly different lens each year.
The 6th grade capstone is a collaborative, problem-solving experience in which students are engaged in the design of real-world solutions based around the theme of “building community.”
While the capstone days take place at the end of the 6th grade year, the 6th grade team sets the stage for spring capstone work in the fall. Throughout the fall semester, sixth graders take part in various activities designed with “community-building” in mind. Later in the spring semester, capstone work begins.
Sixth graders are introduced to six sub-themes, including building relationships, healthy living, environmental responsibility, digital citizenship, traditions, and equity and inclusion. Each student selects sub-themes that interest them.
Sorted by students’ choices, teams of approximately ten students are created. These teams collaborate during their capstone days. Each team is led by a 6th grade teacher who guides their group through a problem-solving process. The goal for each team is to design a product, policy, or experience that positively impacts the PD community. At the end of their three-day capstone experience, teams present their solutions and designs to their peers. Some of these designs have become a part of our middle school culture.
The 7th grade class continues to experience empathetic design as an end-of-year capstone project. Students work in teams with a faculty facilitator to address the overall theme of inclusion. Ultimately, students are challenged to design or create an action, product, or experience that makes our city or state more inclusive.
To jump-start the capstone, the school invites eleven Community Partners to be a part of this experience with students. Community Partners then share their expertise, tell their story, and invite curiosity in a way that inspires our 7th graders to want to take action. These presentations either take place during class meetings or they are spread out between English, History, and Science classes.
Our Community Partners represent a wide range of experiences and perspectives centered around the theme of inclusion. In spring, students choose a Community Partner and work collaboratively in a small group to design a possible solution for them.
The 8th grade capstone connects to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Students rank topics that are inspiring to them, and groups are made from those rankings.
Students are asked to work towards multiple goals surrounding these topics. First, they research and define a problem they want to solve related to their UN topic, then evaluate an existing solution to this problem. Secondly, they design an experience for younger students that helps them understand the complexity of this issue. Not only do we want to give students a chance to think deeper about world issues, we also want to use this opportunity to help students develop their collaboration and communication skills.