Building community with purpose

How we’re enriching student life in the Upper School

JEREMY: How are we creating an advisory space that is collaborative and that aligns with our values?

ANNA: The advisory program is built upon our mission and goal to have important, meaningful, sustaining relationships between faculty and students. The Grade 9 advisory curriculum does a deep dive into our core values with different activities centered on each value during the year. The Grades 10 to 12 curriculum meanwhile examines our eight dimensions of learning, such as agency, character, or honesty, and centers on conversations and activities around the different parts of what it means to be a learner and the students they want to become.

JEREMY: How are assemblies designed to create community and empower our boys?

ANNA: We are using three key verbs to gather each and every assembly, which are to learn, to celebrate, and to inform.

By Jeremy Katz ’04 Associate Director

with varying identities, and this year we’re supporting and acknowledging the importance of affinity groups and times by gathering during our school day.

JEREMY: Tell me how the incoming freshmen are building community when they enter high school.

The goal is to empower our students to lead in the space that is dedicated for them and to them. The boys confidently claim their voices through storytelling, and by celebrating their own achievements, as well as honoring and acknowledging celebrations that happen more generally or out in the world.

JEREMY: What activities do our boys engage in outside of academic classes to form meaningful relationships?

ANNA: As a community we are always hungry for more time to connect and collaborate with one another. Through our extensive offering of clubs, students have opportunities to explore areas of passion, interest, and curiosity with their peers and faculty. We have marked some of these as Panther Pride Clubs, which highlight spaces such as our social impact partnerships or student newspaper which require reflection and benefit the community. Additionally, we have students

ANNA: We witness many changes in students as they grow up. This is especially true for our Grade 9 students. In December, we held a workshop to reflect on how we can continue to build a caring community. Through these exercises, we explored what respect, for instance, looks like and wrote a list of actions that, taken together, will demonstrate that respect towards teachers, community members, and peers.

JEREMY: Tell me how the Grade 12 Peer Leadership program offers support to the freshmen.

ANNA: One of the most exciting parts of student life this year is our senior Peer Leadership program. The boys who were elected to this position contribute greatly to the ninth graders’ sense of belonging, meeting every other week to guide the ninth graders’ transition into Upper School. The Peer Leaders have taken on this work with such grit and strength, and it is theirs to design and reflect and learn how to lead together. To have a program that really honors that connection is fantastic.