New Curriculum
By Will San Jose '22
The Greens Farms Academy Upper School introduced a new curriculum on January 16 which will phase out AP courses while adding higher-level inquiry courses over the next two years.
The inquiry and Advanced Inquiry courses will be available as soon as next school year; some AP courses will be available to current sophomores and juniors for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years.
The Greens Farms Academy curriculum guide for the upcoming year states students enrolled in inquiries “will typically explore a topic in greater depth than in traditional courses and/or learn a new skill or gain knowledge about a topic that is not covered in the curriculum.”
In Advanced Inquiries, “students will identify a problem and ask their own questions, chart their own paths of inquiry, present their work to a real audience, and deliver an original piece of work,” according to the curriculum guide.
In a poll of Greens Farms Academy Upper School students, 31 of 44 respondents—70.5%—approved of removing AP courses.
“[Removing APs] allows for more creative freedom with the material being taught and relieves the stress of taking AP courses, which in some cases, can be very stress inducing,” a positive response said.
Head of Upper School Mr. Jones and Head of School Mr. Whelan both spoke of the importance of incorporating GFA’s core values of passion, integrity, empathy, curiosity and excellence into the new curriculum. “On a certain level, if your work has integrity, it hangs together,” Mr. Jones said. “I’m looking forward to a lot of students finding their way into work like that.”
“When I came to GFA, I sat down with every member of the faculty, and I asked them to tell me about their best teachers,” Mr. Whelan said. “Invariably they would talk about the best teachers in their lives as being ones who were passionate and enthusiastic about their subject area.”
“I do my best work when I care the most, so why would a 17-year-old be any different?” Mr. Jones added.
Mr. Jones said the discussion to remove AP courses started in 2004.
“One can look at the Signature Programs and the original Scientific Research—that is already a move beyond the AP,” Mr. Whelan said.
The World Perspectives Symposium, a result of the World Perspectives Signature Program, began in 2011. Sustainability projects have been presented for the past five years.
“We want to put kids in a position to follow their curiosity, [and] let their curiosity become a driver for their work,” Mr. Jones said.
Negative reactions to the curriculum included concerns about how colleges may view the lack of AP courses. “I am not certain that colleges will be able to distinguish the difficulty of courses that I will be taking,” one negative response said. “The AP courses gave a black and white answer, now this just makes it more difficult for students to get into good colleges.”
“These tests and others like the SAT, ACT, and PSAT are the only true means of comparing the standards of different schools,” another response added. “For example, even though GFA may think that its courses are taught with academic rigor that is superior to other schools in the state or even in the nation, unfortunately the only true means of comparison is for all of these students to take the same test. As a result, taking students away from learning to excel on these tests is really taking away their ability to excel on an application, which is eventually a large part of the purpose of a preparatory school such as GFA.”
Mr. Jones said his hopes for the new curriculum were based on students’ futures. “I hope to see more students doing higher-level work in more areas that they care more about,” he said. “I hope to see faculty, myself included, find more ways of unlocking that potential and supporting it as students achieve things that we haven’t dreamed of yet.”