March 2019 Educational Leadership Grants
Ethel Walker
Simsbury, CT
The Capabilities Approach at The Ethel Walker School
In a 2019 New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Why Girls Beat Boys at School and Lose to Them at the Office,” Lisa Damour asked a provocative question - “What if school is a confidence factory for our sons, but only a competence factory for our daughters?” What if we go further to also ask - why is it that girls tend to be academic successes at the primary, secondary and college level yet, year by year, tend to be less vocal? And why, though their academic success propel them into fine colleges and universities, do girls yield dominance increasingly even so? Clearly a myriad of factors are at work, both internal and external to the individual. The key question is - what can schools do to address this divergence?
The Walker’s Capabilities Approach program intends to disrupt this gendered mindset in a way that reimagines girls’ education. The capabilities represent a constellation of skills, interwoven and foundational, allowing for challenge and failure, with the end goal being functional mastery of each skill. The capabilities approach recognizes social justice as a primary goal, as each student is encouraged to overcome any obstacles to achieve her full potential. The ten capabilities are divided into four categories - fluencies, discoveries, agencies and a self-selected capability. What is critical is not only what, but how. Recognizing that the most complex problems of our era require collaboration and team effort, we see girls coming together, ‘bolstering’ one another over the hurdles within the program. Bolstering means both encouragement and uplift from peers who have already achieved proficiency in a particular area. The acquisition of fundamental mastery in these capabilities will help our students develop resiliency through the process, as they strive to achieve baseline proficiency in these areas, with some capabilities requiring greater ‘stretching’ of limits than others. This means that the process, not just the result, will be a goal in itself, and our intention is that this ‘bolstering’ model of learning will become the Walker’s Way, a template for acquiring new skills that is collaborative and iterative.
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:1
Greenwich Academy
Greenwich, CT
The grant will support Greenwich Academy's GAINS (Girls Advancing In STEM) initiative. What began in 2011 as a virtual community of Upper School girls with a passion for STEM and focused on building connections with peers and mentors, has grown into a national network of students and professionals in various stages of their STEM careers that culminates in an annual conference. The grant will support three primary goals: first, to advance and sustain the annual national GAINS Conference; second, to enable the expansion of GAINS Clubs at independent schools and to add a significant student leadership component to Club membership; and, third, to design an infrastructure that will enable the continued growth of the digital platform and community, including the development of a centralized database of GAINS mentors, students, schools, volunteers, and partners. The first goal post of the Leadership Grant will be the November 2019 GAINS Conference in partnership with PennEngineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Launched, in part, by an initial traditional grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation in 2014, the GAINS annual national conferences have been hosted at leading research universities such as MIT, Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford University, and NYU. The objective is to provide girls who attend GAINS conferences opportunities to network with women leaders in STEM fields, explore STEM career options, tour world-class research centers, participate in related workshops, and connect with peers.
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:1
'Iolani School
Honolulu, HI
ʻĀina-informatics Network (AIN) is an outgrowth of `Iolani School’s ongoing citizen science program which seeks to engage students in authentic scientific research opportunities. The program objectives are two-fold. The first goal is to implement placed-based genomic science via a network of participating public and private schools. Building on its citizen science framework, `Iolani will provide teacher professional development, laboratory equipment, bioinformatics and lab expertise, and overall coordination of the state-wide consortium. Schools participating in AIN will assemble whole genomes for indigenous organisms. In a test of this model, the first novel extremophile bacterial genome has been sequenced, assembled, and annotated at a partner school resulting in the opportunity for its students to name a new species of bacteria. `Iolani is committed to working with peer schools interested in replicating this model in their region. The second goal of AIN is to create a worldwide network of schools and institutions committed to developing and disseminating high school-level educational materials on the topic of bioethics. `Iolani has engaged world-leading genomics institutes that are committed to furthering societal and ethical considerations that come with advances in biotechnology. The school will work to create a public and private school network to further the teaching of bioethics in high schools.
Grant Amount: $182,200
Match: 1:1
Millbrook School
Millbrook, NY
MillbrookEngage. The purpose of this grant is to support MillbrookEngage, a paid service-based summer internship program designed to connect high school students to nonprofits. Millbrook School’s mission is to prepare its graduates for college and for lives of meaning and consequence by instilling the values of respect, integrity, stewardship, service, and curiosity, and MillbrookEngage extends the impact of our mission into the world in meaningful ways. The program offers profound opportunity and tangible value for the student interns, for the nonprofits served, and for Millbrook School. The strength of MillbrookEngage lies in what has been an underdeveloped connection between a high school student’s interest or passion in a particular field and the skills they can develop and put to work in service to others. Students completing internships develop social intelligence, practice empathy, realize and hone new skill sets, and share lessons in ethical citizenship with the entire school.
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:2
The Seven Hills School
Cincinnati, OH
Civic Engagement Seminars
Today’s young people are part of a generation that is looking to make a difference in the world. Through its new Civic Engagement Seminars, The Seven Hills School will help upper school students better understand some of the complex and interconnected challenges of our time and will engage them in finding solutions to those challenges. Every upper school student and teacher will join one of a series of annual seminars on topics related to environmental sustainability, economic inequality, government, public health, or equity and justice. Over the course of four school days dedicated to the Civic Engagement Seminars, each group will follow a design-thinking process to identify a pressing issue and to move toward a tangible solution to that issue. We will think globally and act locally, bringing guest speakers to campus, visiting local institutions, engaging in service learning, and drawing on area resources to better understand a pressing, far-reaching issue. As students better understand the issue they are studying, they will take action and raise awareness to help address this issue. An extension of our successful Experiential Learning program, the Civic Engagement Seminars will encourage students to see themselves as agents of change and to find in themselves what Stanford psychologist William Damon calls “a path to purpose.” We believe that Seven Hills students will emerge from the program with a greater sense of civic responsibility and with a commitment to applying their talents to effect change in the world.
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:1
Waynflete School
Portland, ME
The E.E. Ford Leadership Grant inspires youth to revitalize our democracy by scaling up Waynflete’s models for teaching dialogue across differences and fostering purposefully engaged citizenship.
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:1