Op-Ed: Welcome to the Future of Education

by Chris Pomar, Assistant Headmaster for Enrollment & Planning at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School

One of the first things you would have heard from Pat Bassett,  former president of the National Association of Independent Schools, is “The future is already here!”

Bassett recently retired from his post and was uniquely positioned to comment on trends and best practices in education after a 42-year career in schools.

Faced with the intimidating proposition of providing tomorrow’s education today, many schools are taking drastic steps to proclaim they are seeking or possess the qualities of “schools of the future,” “21st-century education,” or “design thinking,” and are preparing to re-examine, re-engineer, or revise their curricula and strategic plans to meet those challenges.

May I be so bold as to suggest to many of these schools: “Come on in and join us!” Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School has been delivering an education to meet the demands of the 21st century for quite some time. 

As evidence, take a look at how we stack up against the “Essential Capacities for the 21st Century” inventory from the NAIS Commission on Accreditation’s Committee on Schools of the Future:

Analytical and Creative Thinking and Problem-Solving: Among the ways our students and faculty demonstrate these traits are the frequency with which they are asked to work in teams, from the Primary to Upper Schools, in subjects as varied as French, statistics, or visual arts.

The Lower School’s Continued Understanding Brings Success (CUBS) curriculum, for example, is based entirely on critical thinking skills and group problem-solving, instilling lessons that will stay with students throughout their lives.

The ways Holy Innocents’ fosters creative thinking are almost too numerous to count—an impressive visual arts curriculum through all four divisions, HIES’ academic partnership with Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, creative writing assignments and the “Rhyme & Reason” literary journal in the Upper School, the Lower School’s wax museum of historical figures, video assignments in eight grade history, as well as apps being developed for facial recognition software by our 2013 salutatorian, James Best. 

Complex Communication—Oral and Written: It would be much easier to make a list of the courses not utilizing complex communication skills in HIES classrooms. These skills are taught early in the Early Learning and Pre-K grades and are furthered by the active-listening curriculum in Kindergarten classrooms and the professional and thorough writers’ workshop courses in Lower School.

In Middle School, writing styles are honed, presentation and oral report skills are polished, and projects, such as creating press kits for non-profit agencies, pull skills together.

Journal-keeping is practiced in many grade levels, and wiki pages are frequently involved in English assignments, including the year-long novel-writing assignment for AP English language students. 

We get feedback from recent graduates that they are extremely popular with their peers at group project times for the cogent and concise presentations they master as HIES students! Weekly chapel services at every division emphasize the spoken, written—and sung!—word, along with listening, reflecting and responsorial participation.

Leadership and Teamwork: One of my favorite aspects of working at an Episcopal school is the heavy emphasis on community service. Our students frequently zero in on causes that mean something to them, and they become leaders at an agency or a group working for a specific cause.

There is no better way to practice and learn leadership skills than through these real life examples. A number of our students have been recognized nationally for their efforts: Kendall Jackson, Class of 2013 valedictorian, was the 2012 Girl Talk Volunteer Leader of the Year, and rising senior Amber Abernathy, with her “All Teens Against Violence” program won the Julie Foudy Sports Leadership Academy’s Choose to Matter contest.

The steadfast HIES Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation volunteers have been recognized as the annual “Top Fundraising School Community” for six years running.

These projects and many more have both local and global impact, including 2012 graduate Robert Moore’s Kicks for Kids program to provide shoes for orphans of war in Afghanistan, or his classmate Emma van Beuningen’s micro-business to establish solar-powered cell phone charging stations in Kenya, as well as rising senior Mary Catherine Thomson’s service on the board of the HIES Horizons chapter (for at-risk kids), and 2013 graduate Katie Serafen’s heartfelt dedication to Hospice Atlanta. 

Aside from the leadership through service inherent through Holy Innocents’’ mission as an Episcopal school, teamwork is fostered in: All of our phenomenal music ensembles; drama productions from the Kindergarten nativity pageant to the fourth grade flash mob playground takeover, to the impressively professional fifth grade, Middle and Upper School plays, to the award-grabbing Upper and Middle school musical—as well as the obvious examples of the 20 varsity sports programs and their JV and middle school counterparts.

That HIES seems to always finish in the top five of all athletic programs in the state, and in 2013 was the highest-ranked independent school in the GHSA single A Director’s Cup final tally, is more evidence of the very high quality of our programs.

Digital and Quantitative Literacy: Standout teaching and learning in mathematics and technology has become an HIES hallmark, and this excellence will be even more apparent when the new Science/Technology/ Engineering/Math (STEM) classrooms and labs are built in the new Upper School building in two years. 

In addition to quantitative skills inherent in unique courses in personal finance and social entrepreneurship, the Middle School’s Math Counts team was the largest in history this year, and the Upper School’s math honor society had several of its members featured in the Upper School film festival’s Statlanta Police feature.

Global Perspective: Our students benefit from a robust sister-school program, with exchanges in Sapporo, Japan, Briey, France, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Cape Town, South Africa. However, the international perspective is not limited to sister- school relationships.

Through a partnership with the Ameson Foundation, Gene Bratek has been to China, and Chinese students have spent five weeks taking Upper School classes in mid-winter the last two years. 

The Lower School is expanding its world languages program to include French this fall, and Mandarin will be taught for the second year in the Upper School. Several HIES students have been traveling to China and Ghana this summer, and a trip is planned to Peru in 2014.

Language students have Skype conversations with students around the world, and at least one international student has been enrolled in the Upper School since 2004. 

Integrity and Ethical Decision-Making: Along with the emphasis on community service, character development is one of the most obvious and outward ways HIES lives its mission as an Episcopal school. Courses in religion and character development are part of the curriculum at every grade level, including Ethics classes in both the 8th and 11th grades. 

Chapel services encourage reflection on what it means to be a good person and live a life of virtue and values.

Students serve in leadership roles on the Judicial Board and Integrity Council in the Upper School, and the signing of the integrity code banner by every student is one of the first things to occur in chapel at the start of each school year.