Teacher Development Grant 2023-2024 Project Summary

Dr. Clay Drinko

High Meadow School • Stone Ridge, NY

Through this project, High Meadow will expand their middle school capstone experience to increase student engagement and agency and improve students’ research and writing skills. Expanding the capstone program will also help teachers align across grades and content areas to support students as they propose and develop their year-long projects and share out their findings with the entire High Meadow community. At the end of their 7th-grade humanities class, students investigate the differences between equality and equity and then choose a historical topic to teach the class about a specific inequity and how people tried to remedy it. They then create a project that aims to make life at High Meadow more equitable.

This mini-capstone project lays the foundation for students to think about their community, their place in it, and how to positively impact it and leads to their 8th-grade capstone, which asks students to develop an inquiry question in a field that interests them. Next, they will create a proposal, research and write a dissertation, create a project that comes out of their inquiry, work with a community mentor, complete 25 hours of community service in their related field, and then share their findings at a capstone fair that all community members are invited to.

Some examples of capstone topics include: creating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth, improving literacy with book boxes, teaching young people about menstruation, developing novel solutions for litter removal, designing a social experiment to see how to nudge people toward generosity, teaching economically disadvantaged youth financial literacy, starting a bouldering after school program, teaching the community about service animals, and starting a literary magazine for underrepresented youth.

When tasked with changing the world, 8th graders are ready to think big and use their unique voices, so expanding the capstone to allow students to actually realize this change feels vital. The capstone offers teachers a clear goalpost to align teaching across grades and content areas.

Before the projects get off the ground, the project leaders will perform an audit of teacher assessments and curriculum, so that they can measure how the capstone projects, related professional development, and capstone fair help teachers align over time. A major part of this work will be the reflective alignment teachers will do during professional development. The hope is that having clear, ambitious, creative student goals and expectations will help teachers across grades K-7 align and become enmeshed and engaged in what the 8th graders are doing and raise the bar for what’s possible across all grades.

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