As you well know, Trinity School is guided by its mission as a college preparatory community that provides a nurturing environment to enrich the mind, strengthen the body, enliven the soul, and inspire servant leadership. Each day students have opportunities to grow in mind, body, spirit, and citizenship as they cultivate their character, intellect, and passion. The School’s academic program is central to this work, and I want to use this month’s update to share the vision for academic excellence at Trinity.

 

Trinity’s goal as a college preparatory community is to prepare its graduates for the colleges and universities that are the “best fit” for them. Regardless of which school they attend, Trinity alumni should be critical thinkers, skilled communicators, flexible problem solvers, and competent time managers. As critical thinkers, they should be able to discern main ideas, supporting arguments, and biases. Skilled communicators can share their ideas cogently and persuasively either orally or in writing. The ability to determine root causes and their effects is required for flexible problem solving as is tenacity through adversity. Finally, competent time managers balance the demands of a college workload with the social and community opportunities that are essential to the college experience.

 

Our efforts to fulfill this part of the mission start in Preschool and continue through the final senior experience. Our youngest Chargers practice these skills through free play and early literacy and numeracy activities. Over their years at Trinity, students transition from learning to read to reading to learn. In Lower School, students learn to effectively communicate ideas with supporting evidence and then progress from writing sentences to paragraphs to multiple paragraphs to multiple pages. They learn research skills that culminate with a capstone research project as part of the Seek and Find program, a new graduation requirement starting with the Class of 2025. Trinity’s math program balances fact fluency with conceptual understanding. Students move from counting bears to the possibility of earning college credit for Calculus II. Along the way, they participate in school musicals and band concerts. They participate on athletic teams and in expeditionary learning. These experiences build skills and content knowledge that prepare them for what lies ahead. Recent alumni share that they feel prepared when they start college and feel significantly more prepared than many of their first-year peers.

 

As important as these skills are for college, they are also important for life. Informed citizens must be discerning in evaluating information in the public sphere. These skills are also helpful as students become sophisticated consumers and need to evaluate mortgages, investment opportunities, and more.

 

These goals are ambitious and require hard work from students and teachers alike, students will experience bumps in the road. At times, they will not meet our expectations or their own, even though they gave their best efforts. The lessons they learn from falling short, getting up, and trying again also