Preparing Your Student For College and Beyond: How a Selwyn Education Prepares Students for College at Each Stage of Education
June 14th, 2019
At Selwyn, our vision is to elevate the human condition by encouraging students’ long-term development through high academic standards and age appropriate challenges that foster creative problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and social responsibility from which world leaders emerge.
Our students are co-creators in the fulfillment of this vision, which means ensuring we cultivate the appropriate learning environment for each stage of their development is foundational to their success as future college students and, eventually, world leaders.
Upper and Lower Elementary Education, Laying the Foundation for Higher Education
Our kindergarten and elementary education is designed to cultivate emotional intelligence, so students are able, at the earliest age, to begin developing the personal and social competencies necessary to one day embrace the challenges all students are confronted with in higher education and as professionals.
Our kindergarten through second grade students learn in a multiage environment in which the youngest students are grouped into learning pods. This approach provides children with the opportunity to lead as well as follow. The learning pod approach allows for cognitive, social, and emotional learning, and provides young children with early opportunities for developing the collaborative skills that will be essential in their college education and careers. Perhaps most importantly, the young students’ natural curiosity is nurtured, and their passion to know “why” is encouraged — a characteristic that will naturally resurface when the students become college learners.
Our third grade students are given the opportunity to assume more individual responsibility for their learning while remaining in a self-contained classroom. This grade serves as the bridge to the departmentalized upper elementary, which includes grades four through six.
Our upper elementary provides students with opportunities to practice self-reliance and independence — this is where they begin to explore the autonomy in education that will become essential when they grow into college students.
Middle School, Creating a Model for Learning as a Process
Our middle school education is designed to empower students to construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, an experience that will re-emerge for them when they enter college. In middle school, students engage in individualized learning experiences and begin to have opportunities for exploring accountability in a learning environment that is supportive and caring.
Middle school and the early years of college are both times of tremendous change physically, emotionally, and academically; therefore, at this stage of development we focus on the process of learning as much as the content that itself offering students a model to fall back on when they experience periods of great change again between the ages of 18 and 21.
High School Education, Illuminating the Path to Individual Potential
The Selwyn high school experience uniquely prepares students for higher education. At this stage of the Selwyn education, students are gaining significant proficiency in time management, stress management, emotional and cultural intelligence and honing their collaborative skills and leadership acumen.
Our high school education is academically challenging and individualistic, so that the unique talents and interests of the students can emerge and a path toward realizing their potential is illuminated. This individualistic approach helps students begin to develop an understanding of what their educational focus might be in college and our smaller class size gives students the one-on-one attention they need to fully engage their potential.
Portrait of a Selwyn Graduate
Ultimately, a Selwyn graduate is prepared to embrace and respond to challenges of all sizes and complexity. Our graduates are confident and have the resolve to maintain focus and effectiveness during times of stress of crisis. Selwyn graduates are community-builders with an instinctive gravitation to leadership. They are honest and operate from a deep well of integrity and compassion that serves as the foundation to all their future educational and professional endeavors.
A Sewlyn graduate emerges from their primary and secondary education ready to thrive in the highly competitive and socially complex world of higher education.
