Ethical and Cultural
- Civic responsibility: Students act responsibly as local and global citizens with the interests of the larger community in mind
- Perspective: Students are able to set aside their own world view and understand another’s perspective
- Systems thinking: Students recognize ways in which different aspects influence one another within a whole, analyzing how parts coalesce to produce an overall outcome
- Culture crossing: Students have authentic experiences of immersion in other cultures – locally, nationally and internationally, and in the residential program
- Ethical issues: Students learn – as they interact with others, and in classrooms and on the playing fields – to raise questions of right and wrong and seek answers that are consistent with their developing moral codes
- Sustainability: Students think and act to promote sustainable practices
- Service: Students serve, and through service, recognize they help themselves as well as others
- World religions: Students appreciate the varied ways in which people around the world experience God in themselves and others and understand how religion is an important motivator of peoples around the world
- World languages: Students demonstrate proficiency in another language
Leadership and Collaboration
- Leadership: Students exercise ethical and responsible leadership, having developed skills rooted in frequent practice and multiple settings; these settings include – but are not limited to – classrooms, Quaker meetings and decision-making, the residential and work programs, Westtown’s ropes course, student organizations and sports teams
- Collaboration: Students are experienced collaborative problem solvers through regular work on diverse teams solving authentic problems in conventional and innovative ways
- Project management: Students manage collaborative projects, incorporating group input and feedback and using interpersonal and problem-solving skills to inspire others and leverage their strengths to reach a common goal
- Discussion: Students facilitate discussion and clerk meetings in the classroom and other settings, learning when it’s appropriate to listen and when to speak
- Qualities and characteristics: As they exercise leadership, students develop flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, productivity and accountability
Scientific and Analytical Literacy
- Experiments: Students learn to ask the right questions that allow them to design and conduct experiments to test hypotheses they have generated
- Analysis: Students analyze, interpret and synthesize data, including alternative points of view
- Problem-solving: Students work individually and collaboratively to solve real-world problems
- Interdisciplinary approaches: Students routinely rely on multiple academic disciplines as they address, understand, and propose solutions to problems
Communication
- Persuasion: Students are experienced composers of multimedia pieces on issues of compelling need, and demonstrate effective oral, written and visual skills
- Listening: Students listen effectively in order to decipher meaning derived from knowledge, values, information and purpose
- Audience: Students express themselves appropriately and effectively based on purpose and audience, especially in diverse and multicultural environments
- Public speaking: Students are practiced in speaking to an audience
Creativity
- Creative thinking: Students demonstrate original, creative and entrepreneurial thinking as they apply and implement their ideas in useful ways
- Creative expression: Students produce creative work in the arts
- Creative process: Students view failure as a learning opportunity, and understand the creative process as being long-term and filled with setbacks before making progress and achieving success, and while maintaining an awareness of real-world limits on implementation of new ideas
- Self-evaluation: Students elaborate, refine, analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts
Information Literacy
- Research: Students are knowledgeable researchers, capable of evaluating the reliability of information for specific purposes
- Tools: Students select, evaluate and use a variety of appropriate tools – audio, video, multimedia and other – to accomplish specific goals
- Media: Students are critical consumers as they decode and understand media that infuse our lives and culture
- Management: Students manage and organize large amounts of information from a variety of sources, synthesizing disparate facts to create a coherent whole
- Ethical use: Students understand and act on ethical and legal issues surrounding access and use of media and information technologies
