Global Citizenship Distinction brings school’s mission to life through individualized pathway
By Marc Aronson, Dean of Academics, Cheshire Academy
When I joined the faculty of Cheshire Academy in the fall of 2008, it’s fair to say the school was at something of a crossroads with its academic program. Like many New England independent schools at the time, our students took a fairly regimented series of courses, tracked by levels, across their time here. But the spirit of a Cheshire Academy education has long been far more egalitarian, inclusive, and personalized. A huge body of research had already and has since confirmed that inclusive classrooms yield better outcomes for ALL learners than tracked ones. Which is why the time was right in 2011 for us to become, at the time, one of only two boarding schools in New England to adopt the International Baccalaureate (IB) Programme. The IB’s focus on process over product, multi-modal assessment, and calibrated levels of rigor and support were an exact right fit for our pedagogy. Perhaps more importantly, the IB’s mission seemed tailor-made for Cheshire Academy, with our focus on international mindedness and global citizenship.
But we still had work to do, and so coming out of the Academy’s 2018 accreditation process, the board of trustees tasked us with two strategic initiatives: to develop individual pathways to success and to increase our focus on global citizenship. Using research from my time at the University of Oxford, I helped the faculty and administration through an exercise designed to help us figure out which of the five models of educationbest fit with these strategic initiatives. We settled on the idea that Cheshire Academy’s academic program is a hybrid of a liberal arts model – a hallmark of New England independent schools, with its focus on the intellectual value of knowledge and the transferability of skills – and the progressive education model – with its focus on the needs and interests of each student.
Having decided this, we embarked on a years-long project to increase access and flatten levels within our program and to dramatically increase the degree to which students have meaningful choices and genuine agency over their academic journeys here. In addition, we radically shifted the focus of our courses to include metacognitive and mission-aligned course goals, a deep grounding in social-emotional learning, multi-modal and open assessments, and we adopted the idea of classrooms as communities of learners, where students share responsibility not just for their own learning, but for the learning of their classmates and the growth of the class a whole.
In 2022, this led to the launch of our new academic vision statement: “Cheshire Academy aims to provide the best (anywhere) education for global citizenship.” We grounded this vision in four foundational concepts: teaching 21st-century skills and capacities, adopting a global perspective, enabling transformative experiences, and fostering individual and collective wellbeing.
As we rolled out this mission, it became clear to us that there was more work to be done in getting those four foundations into our curriculum and in providing our students more individual pathways to success. The community began discussing ways in which we could add the equivalent of college majors or concentrations into our curriculum in addition to the IB diploma. With consistently about a third of our students pursuing the IB diploma over the last decade, it was time to explore what another formal pathway through our curriculum could look like. Hence our Diploma Distinction in Global Citizenship (GC), launching in the 2025-2026 school year, with the first GC cohort graduating in 2027.
We are so excited about this new pathway for our students. As with the IB, students can opt into any amount of the GC pathway they want, but unlike the IB, there are no prerequisites to ‘go for it.’ Students who enroll in the GC Diploma Distinction will essentially be majoring in global citizenship through taking a concentration of courses that carry the GC badge in our curriculum guide. These courses will have course goals, content, skills, and assessments focused on one or more of the following areas: DEI, leadership, service, sustainability. In terms of 21st-century skills and capacities, adopting a global perspective, having transformative educational experiences, and focusing on individual and collective well-being, these content-areas are the perfect way for students in this program to achieve the most excellent version of our academic vision statement. To receive the diploma distinction, students will take a series of GC courses across departments, the Global Citizenship seminar in grade 11, and use their work in that class to prepare a capstone project for their 12th-grade year, which they will complete with the support of a faculty supervisor.
The essence of who we are at Cheshire Academy has long been encapsulated in the tagline, “we meet students where they are and take them beyond where they imagine possible.” One of the reasons I have stayed at CA for as long as I have is just how much our students thrive here in our program when other, more traditional settings may not have led to that same level of thriving. The Global Citizenship Diploma Distinction is one more way in which our students – all of our students – have access to an individualized pathway to success: one that will truly enable them, in the words of our mission statement, “to thrive as global citizens.”
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