Theo Hirsch, a rising senior at The Steward School (Photo by Ash Daniel)
All those classes, all that homework, all those years … for what? Does a high school education really develop innovative, enterprising, problem-solving, collaborating, socially sensitive citizens who we all hope will one day save the world?
A capstone project is one way to find out.
Started more than 30 years ago at schools such as the University of Virginia and University of California, Los Angeles, a capstone project allows a student to showcase their critical thinking and communication skills by executing a significant project centered on a real-world problem.
The idea caught the attention of the College Board, the organizing body for SAT exams and Advanced Placement classes. While AP classes have long been a staple of college-bound students’ transcripts, the College Board wanted more of a connection between the courses. English wasn’t like math. Or was it?
In 2014, they developed the AP Capstone Diploma, a two-year program that “equips students with the independent research, collaborative teamwork and communications skills that are increasingly valued by colleges,” according to the College Board website. It is divided into two yearlong classes: AP Seminar and AP Research. Each offers a certificate of completion when a student has conducted research and created the final project, be it a public presentation for the AP Seminar or a detailed paper for AP Research. Students who opt for both classes and take the prerequisite six AP classes can earn a Capstone Diploma. Individually and together, the Capstone Diploma and the two AP certificates are big gold stars on a student’s college application.
“It has helped differentiate our students when they apply for university,” says Christopher Ryan, head of Millwood School in Midlothian. “Since doing the capstone program, we have had more acceptances in higher levels of university. This year, two of our students were accepted into the University of Richmond.”
Millwood School embraced the AP Capstone program in 2020, requiring all students to complete the AP Seminar in their junior year. Millwood is the only private school in the Richmond area to offer the structured AP program.
“It’s a rigorous course that has given a bit more structure to the whole AP model,” Ryan says. “It’s the kind of thing you do in the first year of university.”
Nadine Odibo, a rising senior at The Steward School (Photo courtesy The Steward School)
A Curriculum Cornerstone
While Millwood uses the AP model, it is not the only school embracing the capstone concept. Such projects have become a curriculum cornerstone for several local prep schools. The approach varies, but the objective is the same: Get students engaged with issues bigger than themselves — often community- based — and stretch their academic bandwidth to delve deeply into solutions for real-life problems.
“[Students] pick an issue that they are passionate about and identify a specific need related to that topic,” says Eliza McGehee, leadership program coordinator and upper school history teacher at The Steward School in Henrico County’s Tuckahoe area. “Then, they design and create a project aimed at enacting positive change, either here on campus or in the broader community.”
Projects can take various forms: a product or service prototype, a community service initiative, an action-oriented research paper, a multimedia presentation, or a performance. It all depends on the student’s interests and the educational context.
Steward School rising senior Nadine Odibo used her capstone project to design an interactive curriculum for students to learn how to create safer spaces online. “I chose this project primarily because I was one of 18 students selected to serve on Snapchat’s first Council for Digital Well-Being, and for the past year, I have been exposed to discussions on how to create safer spaces online, especially for teenagers,” Odibo says. Her project includes videos and small-group discussions “where the advisory groups could comment their feelings on any of the topics, which included online predators, cyberbullying, authenticity online and healthy social media habits. These lessons allowed students to have honest conversations while also feeling safe in intimate groups,” she says.
Theo Hirsch, also a Steward rising senior, developed Project E.A.T. (Engage with others, Agree to disagree, Talk for a better future). “It was a pilot program that I created in which students could share their opinions openly while cooking a meal together,” Hirsch says. “This was intended to create a stronger sense of community among peers who may have differing opinions on current events. If there is one universal aspect of the human experience, it is food.”
McGehee developed The Steward School capstone curriculum four years ago to build a leadership program unique to the school’s culture. “The program is a three-year commitment,” McGehee says. Students apply in their freshman year. “For the first two years, students do a cohort-based course once a month. The capstone project they complete in their junior year is done independently.”
“We have plenty of students who apply in their freshman year,” says Scottie O’Neill, associate program coordinator and an upper school math teacher at Steward. “We select only 20 to 25.”
“The idea behind a three-year program is that students will have the leadership skills and competencies to step into leaderships roles by the time they are seniors at Steward,” McGehee says. “They use the successful completions of this program on their college applications."
Krishna Sharma, a Collegiate School rising freshman, at Lumpkin's Jail (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Community Engagement
Leadership and civic engagement are the backbones of the capstone program at Collegiate School, also in Tuckahoe, which occurs in the final year of each division: fourth, eighth and 12th grades. Guided by the school’s Powell Institute for Responsible Citizenship, the capstone program is part of the school’s mission to graduate empathetic and engaged citizens.
In the fourth grade, the program theme is Envision Collegiate. Students spend an immersive week looking around their school and, to some extent, the community to identify areas of growth or change.
For Envision Richmond in the eighth grade, students spend the week visiting Richmond-area sites and working in teams to develop solutions to problems they identify, such as food insecurity or foster care.
Krishna Sharma, 14, chose historic preservation for her project. “In the fall, my group visited a lot of cemeteries, but we also went to historic places like Lumpkin’s Jail,” she says. “These were places that weren’t as well preserved. We were trying to help the Richmond 300 plan,” she says, referencing a City Council-approved master plan for area growth to create a more equitable and sustainable future when Richmond celebrates its 300th birthday in 2037.
“We had lots of brainstorming and coming up with a plan to help preserve those sites better,” Krishna says. “We came up with different things, things that could help people find out where their ancestors are buried or help make the cemetery a place that people would want to go to more. We found inspiration from things that existed, but we then kind of made it our own.”
One idea was to install statues of famous Richmonders, such as Maggie Walker, with an audio feature that would tell their stories. “It would make a place that people would like to come out and visit,” Krishna says. “It was really cool to engage directly with the Richmond community, and it inspired me to want to make more changes in my community.”
That was the point, according to Kevin Duncan, director of the Powell Institute. “Fourth and eighth graders use something called design thinking to learn design process,” he says. “They identify a problem and try to understand all the different factors that have created it, all the different users impacted by it, what is currently being done and then research to fully understand it. They develop their own ideas and then eventually share those ideas in some type of public presentation.”
For Krishna, that presentation was “definitely very challenging. We really had to think outside the box for this project, but once we got our idea, we all had to work together to make a presentation about it.”
In the 12th grade at Collegiate, students take a semester-long course focusing on one or more of “the pillars of Responsible Citizenship: Global Engagement, Economic Literacy, Entrepreneurship, Sustainability and Civic Engagement,” according to the school’s website.
That may mean putting together a TEDx Youth event, Duncan says. “Instead of the students speaking, they are organizing a conference and getting speakers from around the Richmond community who have unique ideas and solutions.”
Other projects have included creating a team to compete in the Ethics Bowl — a challenge where students explain and defend stances on the moral aspects of current issues — with the hopes of making it to the national finals. Another approach is spending the summer at the school’s Cochrane Summer Economic Institute, where students get a better idea of the real-world challenges of operating businesses in Richmond.
Mimicking the Masters
Hunter Classical Christian School’s Olivia Scolaro with her sixth grade capstone project (Photo courtesy Hunter Classical Christian School)
The Hunter Classical Christian School on Derbyshire Road in Richmond has an entirely different slant on a capstone program. The school’s approach to teaching is based on exploration of and immersion in great masters of the ages.
“The idea of mimicry — imitating the masters — is a theme that we talk a great deal about within classical space,” says Kendall Wolfson, Hunter’s dean of advancement. “Studying the best of what’s been thought, said, written and created is what we do with our students at every stage at this school.”
Hunter takes the same approach to its capstone program. Every sixth grade student participates in what Wolfson calls the master art program. “For their capstone project, they couple their research and their writing about one of the great artists of the past [and] replicate five to eight works of that master. They spend a year learning about that artist, learning about their works, their lives, their childhood and their professional endeavors while also re-creating a number of that artist’s iconic pieces.
“That culminates in a presentation of the artwork they produce and a public speaking opportunity where they share in front of classmates, parents, grandparents and school supporters. Their art is on display in one of our partner organizations, most recently as a display in Chesapeake Bank on Patterson Avenue,” Wolfson says.
Despite the various approaches to the capstone idea, all of the schools share a goal: Get a student out of their comfort zone by immersing them in a real-world problem or project that stretches their research, writing, leadership and public speaking skills. Not only can the experience help them succeed in life, but it just might create the kind of civic-minded and engaged citizens the world needs.
