After more than a year of meetings, the Curriculum Review Committee presented its report to both the faculty and the Board of Trustees last week. Major proposals include the institution of Arabic as a foreign language, the elimination of the psychology graduation requirement, and a new requirement for a term of global studies that can be fulfilled in several ways.

Last winter, the Curriculum Review Committee was formed under a plan to examine Choate’s current curriculum. The first meetings took place last spring and there was a week of intensive daily meetings in June. The committee met several more times this school year to wrap things up.

Kathleen Wallace, Dean of Academic Affairs, chairs the committee, which is comprised of the six department heads, Diana Beste, Cyrus Cook, Bob DeMarco, Gwenith Heuss-Severance, Larry Stowe, and Paul Tines, along with the Director of Studies and Registrars, Monica St. James, and two at large faculty representatives, Scott Mattoon and Bill Berghoff.

Curriculum review is a tricky business in which many standards must be taken into consideration. “We have certain graduation requirements here that we feel are important, but there are also the de facto graduation requirements that colleges expect applicants to their school to have,” said Mrs. Wallace in an interview last Thursday.

According to a draft version of the “Curriculum Review Committee Report” published in January, the last time the curriculum was examined was more than a decade ago under the Standing Committee of Academic Life in 1994. Such changes as the current quantitative requirement, independent study programs, the world history requirement, removal of the economics requirement, distribution of the arts requirement over all four years, increased number of AP exams, proficiency testing, more flexible yearlong courses, and the introduction of Chinese as a foreign language can be cited as the results of that committee’s work.

“We gathered a lot of information from a lot of people,” said Mrs. Wallace.

According to the draft version of the report, the committee began to gather this information in the spring of 2005 from student and faculty workshops as well as a student survey. Headmaster Ed Shanahan also shared with the committee parental and faculty feedback when he had asked them “to think of our mission as a school – particularly in light of the changed world of circumstances that we find ourselves in following September 11, 2001.” Shanahan later encouraged the committee “to recognize the need for our students to be even more exposed to world literatures, cultures, and religions prior to their graduation from Choate.”

After gathering information from students, faculty, and parents, the Curriculum Review Committee determined 10 areas of interest as outlined in its draft report:
• The preparation of students to become responsible world citizens with awareness of both the social and natural worlds
• The requirement of time away from campus
• The better structuring of the 3rd and 4th form years to provide students the foundation needed while progressing through the curriculum
• Focusing on essential study skills needed by all students
• Examination of graduation requirements
• Examination of the co-curriculum
• The meaningful expansion of the study of arts across the curriculum
• Examination of the role of directed studies in the curriculum
• Examination of the purpose of summer reading requirements

After examining all of these areas, the committee came up with a few changes to the curriculum that will take effect beginning next year with the arrival of the class of 2010. One change will be the introduction of Arabic to the foreign language program. The addition of Arabic is in response to the committee’s goal of creating a worldlier student body; in today’s world Arabic is becoming ever more prominent and important as an international language.

Another change will be the replacement of the psychology requirement for 3- and 4-year students with a requirement in Contemporary Global Studies to be completed before graduation, though the psychology course will continue to be offered as an elective. Unlike psychology, there will not be just one course to satisfy the requirement. Currently, Contemporary Global Issues, Current Topics in Biology, Use and Abuse of Power, French in a Global Context, and The Modern Middle East all satisfy the requirement, but more courses will be added in the future.

“We want to create room for the kids to be able to pursue their interests and their passions a little bit earlier in their career here,” said Mrs. Wallace of the variety of available courses.

The committee decided to eliminate the psychology requirement because the original goals of the course when it was initially conceived are no longer pertinent in regards to the current syllabus, said Mrs. Wallace. The course was originally intended as a “health” class, but with all the recent growth in the field of psychology, it is no longer possible to address both health and introductory psychology in the course. Mrs. Wallace added that the job of health education will be transferred to peer educators who will be more active with the underclassmen than they currently are.

In addition to this increased involvement of peer educators, programs will be initiated beginning with the class of 2010 that will teach the freshman and new sophomores who join the class invaluable skills needed to advance successfully through Choate’s curriculum. These include reading texts, note taking, public speaking, writing, doing electronic research, etc.

“We shouldn’t just look at the content of our course and curriculum, we also need to look at the skills that we are helping our students acquire...[the programs] would be geared towards third formers, but we guarantee that all of our students will have those skills going forward,” said Mrs. Wallace of the skill-teaching initiative.

To further investigate the issue, the Third Form Skills Committee was formed and will report back to the Curriculum Review Committee at the end of the winter or beginning of the spring term.

Other changes include the requirement that seniors who have not completed their community service requirement submit a plan at the beginning of the year on how they intend to do so and an in-depth look at the choice of required summer reading novels based on bad reviews on the current books’ utility from last year’s student survey.

Mrs. Wallace has asserted that the hiring of a possibly part-time Arabic teacher and the institution of other changes recommended by the committee will not have any significant impact on the school’s budget.