The Building Blocks of Education

A group of 4th Graders are sitting around Transportation Supervisor Melissa Mingus, rapt, asking her questions about the process and the challenges of getting students from one location to another. How many buses does it take to get the baseball and softball teams over to the Robins Campus in the afternoon for practice? What kind of transportation does a field trip to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts require? How do you manage who drives the buses? After detailed observation, the students consider the carbon footprint of this travel and the ways this process could possibly be refined and done more efficiently. Ideas begin to fly and, within their minds, Collegiate gets a little greener. 

This informative session was part of Envision Collegiate, the 4th Grade Capstone experience. Collegiate’s Capstone program, guided by the School’s commitment to educating responsible citizens, enhances students’ classroom learning in a real-world context, allowing them to apply their academic knowledge to larger communities. 

This year, Lower School students, presented with the challenge of making Collegiate more sustainable by 2032, used the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as a foundational aspect of the Capstone program. Studying real-world challenges such as sustainable agriculture, transportation, energy, and food waste and observing how they apply to Collegiate gives students tangible examples of how their work can serve the broader world, which expands their thinking. “What we try to do in the 4th Grade Capstone is to get the students to see that the world is committed to a certain set of sustainable development goals,” says Rhiannon Boyd, Director of JK-12 Capstones. “But in 4th Grade we bring those challenges down to what is visible to them and their community, which in their case is Collegiate. The students imagine a future for the School and simultaneously see how those goals align with the world. With this kind of focus we get them to understand that all of those big abstract concepts exist here on campus.” The world — and their influence on it — becomes more tangible. 

 

By making connections between how a particular local challenge exists as a global issue enhances students’ understanding of the values and systems that comprise a community. Although their work focuses on Collegiate, the students, throughout the Capstone experience, turn their gaze outward, discovering how other groups beyond campus encounter the same questions of sustainability. Students studying sustainable transportation, for example, studied methods the GRTC Transit System uses to reduce their carbon footprint. No matter the focus, students learn how one system in a community is connected to another. “The connection between local, regional, national, and global is a constant focus,” Boyd says. “Everything is related to everything else. If you can learn what’s working from other systems like GRTC, then maybe that can scale to Collegiate.” 

At its core, the Capstone program is a culminating effort; it compliments and builds off ideas students have learned previously. As students advance through divisions, their mindsets expand with each Capstone, and they continue to complement the skills they learned in previous classes. That all begins in the Lower School, where foundations are built. By the end of the program, 4th Graders have a more sound understanding of how systems, seen both at Collegiate and elsewhere, operate. “This level of experiential learning is really special,” Boyd says. “The number of conversations they had — both with people who don’t work at Collegiate and with people who do — is a great way of taking the work that’s already being done beautifully in divisions and building off that.”