“At Choate, it’s rare to have everyone agreed on something, except for one thing: that Sophomore Seminar needs to be improved,” joked Ms. Rosalind Wiseman when discussing aspects of Choate’s culture. During school meeting on Wednesday, February 1, students and faculty welcomed Ms. Wiseman and her colleague Mr. Charlie Kuhn — a pair of consultants assessing culture at Choate — back to campus. For two days, the duo met with a number of student groups and school administrators to acquire a more holistic view of the many facets of the school that could just be improved – in particular, the current new student orientation program and Sophomore Seminar curriculum.
Mr. Kuhn said, “A belief that Rosalind and I have is that for every system, you can’t just throw everything out and rebuild it. Choate’s orientation system could tolerate the three-hour block that it currently has. However, the way Choate uses the current three-hour block kind of resembles ‘speed dating’ in the sense that there is an overload of information for the students. We’re looking to see if there is a more effective way for the students to be oriented, by first thinking about what values are being portrayed during the orientation program, and how those values affect culture later in the school year.”
Ms. Wiseman added, “We’re also working on things like resolving the conflict between preseason practices and the students’ ability to participate in orientation. This is a logistical issue, but it has large cultural implications.”
According to Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Kuhn, there will be two components to the revisions made to the current Sophomore Seminar curriculum. “For one, we have to identify what aspects of the current seminar we want to keep. But the bigger conversation surrounds the question of what a ‘graduated’ Sophomore Seminar would look like, thinking about the different topics the students would learn in their third, fourth, fifth, and sixth form years, and designing how that curriculum would look,” said Mr. Kuhn.
In addition, Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Kuhn’s schedule was packed with meetings with Mr. James Stanley, the Dean of Students; Mr. Will Morris, the Dean of Residential Life; current prefects and prefect advisers; Mr. Corey Wrinn, Director of Institutional Research; the Pratt Health Center staff; and members from student affinity groups like the Committee on Respectful Relationships (CORR), Young Democrats, Young Republicans, and RISE, Choate’s group for womyn of color.
“This trip was fundamentally different than ones in the past,” said Mr. Kuhn. “Because we felt that we had built some credibility with students and faculty, we began to pivot from just listening and observing to actually putting things in action.”
Ms. Wiseman agreed, saying, “We really felt that we had to understand the School’s culture before we advised the School about anything. It’s truly unethical to just make assumptions about the School and give advice that is going to affect students’ lives significantly. For the past few months, we took the time to really learn what’s going on and make connections with people. This trip, we felt the confidence to be able to give advice, draft correspondences, and propose strategies for moving forward to all the people whom we’re working with.”
Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Kuhn had a joint meeting with Young Democrats and Young Republicans during their visit and discussed the social and political division on campus. Audrey Powell ’19, a member of Young Democrats, commented, “Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Kuhn are great at fostering productive conversation where we can actually get somewhere. We discussed ideas for resolving that tension in the coming year and how we might bring together the two sides of the political spectrum.”
Daniel Stempel ’17, a member of Young Republicans, added, “I wanted to meet with the two of them in order to ensure that the Young Republicans had someone to speak on their behalf. I told them about how many Republican students are afraid to voice their political beliefs because of the potential backlash.”
RISE member Di’Anna Bonomolo ’20 said, “During our meeting with Rosalind and Charlie, we were able to flesh out a lot of great ideas and plans for the future. One suggestion I have for them, though, is to ensure that freshmen and sophomores are in the feedback loop as well. When they were talking during the school meeting, there were some freshmen near me who didn’t really know what was going on, whereas most juniors and seniors seemed to understand everything.”
Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Kuhn will return to campus this April. Mr. Stanley concluded, “I’ve heard questions from students about what they have done and why there hasn’t been any change. I think it is imperative for the students to recognize that change doesn’t happen instantaneously, and that quick change is often counterproductive in the sense you’ll have to go back and do it again if you’re not careful and a mistake happens. The process we’re going through at the moment is not aimed at making change right now, but to lay out things for the future. But even in the short term, the fact that people are talking about this and paying attention to the issue of how we relate to each other is useful and appreciable.”
