When campus is quiet during certain weeks of the summer and vacations during the school year, the pause to the regular rhythm affords time to reflect on the pace of life we experience at a boarding school, and, in turn, what we model for the young people in our lives. In a go-go-go society, teaching our students to slow down is just as important as teaching them how to work hard.
If we believe our job is to prepare students for both college and life, we must continually ask ourselves what skills and experiences our students need in order to effectively navigate the human experience. On a deeper level, how do we challenge students to consider what it means to be human, where this meaning comes from, and how they will respond to the world’s resource scarcity with ingenuity, creativity, and commitment?
Last summer, we shared thoughts on the intersection of metacognition (the process of understanding how we learn) and well-being. This work remains foundational to our research on well-being and Proctor’s evolving policies around phones, human connection, and curriculum. When we zoom out, this relationship of self-awareness and well-being serves as a critical foundation for our entire community’s work preparing our students for both college and life.
As parents, it is so easy to be concerned with the college admissions landscape that we forget that getting into a college is just one small step in our students’ lives. We believe our work is to ensure our students are not only admissible at their best-fit colleges, but are ready to embrace the whole of their post-Proctor experience - in college, the armed forces, or the workforce. How do we make sure our students pursue the most interesting courses, not just the ones that will land them a job or internship? How can our students have the confidence to study abroad? How can we prepare them to pursue the arts or athletics at their chosen place of higher education without a fear of failure? How can we help them believe in themselves so that they step into leadership roles in their communities? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we help them prioritize their own well-being amidst all the other challenges that we know will come their way as adults?
Over the past fifty years, Proctor’s Off-Campus Programs, Wilderness Orientation program have allowed students and teachers to experience a pace that prioritizes intentionality. Days are filled with meaningful engagement, the intangible learning of group dynamics, and proximate lessons in a real-world curriculum, while the busy-work of simply chasing college readiness is placed on the backburner. Institutionally, our work is to learn from the most intentional aspects of our educational model and begin layering their lessons onto those areas of Proctor less insulated from society’s pressure.
Just as we ask our students to embrace the beautiful intersection of metacognition and well-being, we, as a school, must do the same. How can we better understand ourselves as a school and amplify those aspects of Proctor that serve as the most transformative, life-prep experiences for our students?
Read: The Intersection of Metacognition and Well-Being at Proctor Academy
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