By Matt Delaney, Director of Academic Design and Integration

DURING A Q&A PANEL AT A PAST OPEN HOUSE, AN Eastside Prep parent commented, “EPS is more than college prep, it’s life prep.” Built on the platform of our mission and vision statements, the student experience is intentionally designed as preparation for college and beyond.

For many years, Dr. Macaluso has reflected that, “Our fifth graders and twelfth graders are on the same schedule, yet their experiences need to be distinct from each other,” and questioned, “Aside from more advanced coursework, what elements should distinguish the eleventh and twelfth grades as the culmination of the EPS experience?” The existing collegiate-oriented seminar and independent study programs that comprise the school’s independent curriculum are a start toward answering that question.

After designing, constructing, and opening two new physical spaces (the TMAC and TALI buildings) in five years, and completing the school’s re-accreditation, last year our focus returned to the eleventh- and twelfth-grade experience. During the 2019-20 school year, members of the school’s leadership team worked with Dr. David Ferrero, an educational consultant who previously directed research and evaluation for education programs at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Ferrero was retained to provide an outsider’s perspective on the EPS experience. He helped us imagine what adjustments might be made to our program to ensure that students’ final two years at EPS are deeply reflective of the school’s mission and vision.

Over the course of the year, Dr. Ferrero conducted a cultural ethnography, interviewing faculty, staff, students, alumni, and the school’s leadership team about what they value and what they thought the school needed. Not surprisingly, his interviews with alumni provided the richest insights on how the EPS program prepared students for life after graduation. Additionally, Dr. Ferrero researched programs and offerings at other high schools and bridge programs offered by some colleges. Finally, he asked questions about how some current EPS offerings might be re-sequenced or clustered within the junior and senior years to create an experience to help students understand themselves and their place in a quickly accelerating modern world.

From hours of research and dialogue in the work groups, four main student needs emerged:

1. Students need exposure to multiple adult narratives as a representation that life paths are typically non-linear, with turning points and connections that are hard to predict and plan for.
2. Students need to understand how the ever-accelerating modern world works, and how an individual might construct and adapt a personal stance in that world.
3. Students need exposure to a myriad of models and ways of thinking used in different disciplines and domains, as they move toward larger-scale enterprises at EPS, in college, and in the professional world that awaits them beyond college.
4. Students need an introduction to a concept of incremental decision-making and life planning, to be better equipped to make sense of where they are, who they are, and what they want as they encounter new contexts and realities in their lives.

These guiding principles are captured in four prototypes that were launched this year: a speaker series and three new seminars for eleventh- and twelfth-grade students.

The first seminar—Worldviews, Truths and Consequences took place in the first term; the second seminar— Methods, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship was offered in the winter trimester, and the third seminar—Deliberate Design: College, Career, Life is in progress. To date we have hosted three speakers from our faculty and three speakers from the EPS parent community. In the future, two more speakers from outside EPS are slated to present. Descriptions of each of the seminars and speakers to date can be found below.

Final Reflections

While debriefing the Worldviews seminar, student reflections evidenced that our new offerings are on the right track. Some explained that they had never thought about the concept of a worldview before; many indicated that they were not previously aware of the complex worldviews of philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Sartre, and the historian Yuval Noah Harari; and others expressed that they were excited to have the beginnings of their own worldviews, which they plan to adapt and update as they move through their lives. As we progress through this year, we are excited to test, adapt, update, and evolve our newest approaches to preparing EPS students for college and beyond.