High School

The high school covers grades 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th. The Summit high school prepares students for college and for life but it is unlike any other high school in Springfield. The Summit high school focuses on five guiding concepts.

We strive as much as possible to integrate across the curriculum. We consciously develop integrated lessons and projects so that students experience the interconnectedness of the sciences, arts, literature, and social studies. This requires careful planning and being open to new and interesting connections but the end result is a student who is engaged in all of their classes and begins to see beyond the stove pipes of traditional academic subjects.

The high school program is not oriented towards standardized tests. In fact, much of our assessment comes from major and minor projects. With such a focus on integrating our curriculum it is natural to also push further into project-based learning. To give those projects greater meaning, we develop our projects around inquiry and research questions and we also make every effort to integrate our projects into the real world and along each student’s passion.

At The Summit, we feel that teenagers are most engaged with learning when learning is engaged with the real world. To further engage our students we push them to explore and discover their passions in life and to bring those passions into their learning. As an example, last year we studied Walt Whitman’s poetry. We used the inquiry question, “Why is Walt Whitman called, The Great American Poet?” to explore his poetry and biography. The final project for this unit was to explain Walt Whitman’s poetry using a form of expression that you love. One student wrote a classical composition inspired by Song of Myself. One student made custom level in the computer game Warcraft in which you can play as Walt Whitman and “spawn” his poems inside the game. Two students worked together to write an original song, choreograph a dance, and film/edit it into a short film reflecting Whitman’s poetry techniques.

This coming school year we will use the meta, inquiry question, “What does it mean to be human?” across the high school curriculum. Social studies and Science will explore the human sciences through Psychology, Anthropology, Human Anatomy and Human Evolution. Literature will focus on philosophical writings and composition and communication will concentrate on journalism and documentary. All of these subjects will feed a major student service learning project in which students will turn their personal passions into a project to give back to their community.