Upper school Instructional Coach and Teacher Jaclyn Zarella discusses the value of “Purpose” in learning, especially through the lens of capstone experiences. Longer, intentionally designed projects incentivize authentic engagement in learning in both the content and skills necessary to achieve success at a culminating event. Discover how Jaclyn’s senior-level Holocaust and Human Behavior class navigated a year-long learning experience to share their knowledge with 7th graders.
“[The Legacy Project] gave the learning that we had done a sense of purpose … I was pushed to do more than what was required because I was driven to by my own wishes, not by my grade.” –Julia ‘25
This is it, this is the goal. There are many educational terms that you will find on the covers of professional development books: transfer of learning, visible thinking, educational efficacy, but it all boils down to just one word: purpose.
Currently, the discourse in education is riddled with questions about the impact of AI on student learning, particularly as a shortcut to engaging in critical thinking and writing development. As a faculty we are looking forward to exploring this 21st century emerging challenge through our upcoming summer reading Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI to better understand the landscape ahead of us, but in the meantime our discussions have revolved around what we ask our students to do and the purpose that it holds for them. The incentive to cut corners diminishes if the work holds meaning and will be authentically applied. However, it is not enough for us as teachers to tell them that it matters; quality engagement comes from the students' understanding and feeling that it matters. It can be difficult to create that sense of purpose in a short-lived unit-by-unit experience where topics and tasks start and end within just a few weeks. While shorter projects can be incredibly fulfilling, particularly when achieved collaboratively, the result can feel segmented, and the student may not connect how each project builds to a larger totality of learning.
A capstone experience implies that the student built something over time, adding and modifying along the way, and can look in their metaphorical rear view mirror to see a long, connected road that brought them to their ultimate destination. Building backwards from a culminating moment by adding brick by brick over time assigns value to each brick along the way. It also incentivizes authentic engagement in learning in both the content and skills to achieve success at the important end point.
The senior history seminar course, Holocaust and Human Behavior (HHB), has been offered at Field for three years. While the content curriculum is adapted from best practices of Facing History and Ourselves, Echoes and Reflections from Yad Vashem, and a textbook from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the capstone nature of the course project is uniquely tailored to our school community. We call this project “The Legacy Project” as the intent is for the students in the course to transfer their learning and leave a legacy of their learning at the school. In the first year of the course, the students curated an on-campus museum and created an advisory lesson to prepare the community for the visit of Alfred Münzer, a Holocaust survivor, who spoke to the entire school. In the second year, the students created a curriculum guide for all faculty to provide resources and strategies to integrate Jewish history, culture, and Holocaust studies beyond just the History department. They ran a professional development training for their teachers on the curriculum guide, which further informs their curriculum planning. Both of these projects were focused on real, actionable change within their own community and were based upon the ultimate goal of their learning extending beyond the classroom walls to reach others. However, the audience was still very broad, and the impact of their work was difficult to measure in the short time they had left on campus before graduation. This lack of response required a shift in our third-year Legacy Project to focus on a single sub-section of the community and to weave the project throughout the entire course rather than start it in the last unit only.
“Because the ‘educating others’ aspect of the course is present from day one, the work will always feel meaningful and you will want to put your best effort into all of it.” ~Nathaniel ‘25
This year’s Legacy Project was targeted specifically on a partnership between the students of HHB and the 7th grade. The 7th grade curriculum focuses on World Religions in their History class, and they read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank in their English class. This alignment in curriculum provided the perfect opportunity for cross-divisional work. The project was integrated throughout the entire year with two major touch points between the grade levels: an on-campus museum of Jewish history and culture in the first semester, and a tour of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum planned and led by HHB seniors for the 7th graders in the second semester.
Recent discussions in Holocaust Studies have critiqued the approach of studying the Holocaust as a means of responding to acts of antisemitism. Dara Horn has led the discourse on this hard truth in her provocative book People Love Dead Jews in which she contends that limiting one’s understanding of Jews to just focus on the Holocaust can result in an ahistorical understanding of the deep humanity, history, and culture of the Jewish people by focusing purely on the systematic murder that is mainly captured in black and white photographs, distancing the viewer from modern Jews and their experience. Similar arguments have been made in terms of limiting one's study of African Americans to just focusing on slavery, the misuses of Civil Rights History to assume that racial equality was solved in the lifetime of Martin Luther King Jr., and the perpetuation of the “myth of the vanishing Indian” that diminishes the rich history and culture of indigenous communities.
Due to this ongoing discussion, this year, a specific unit of Jewish History was added in the first semester to make space for learning about Jewish life before engaging with the topic of Jewish death. This unit was also our opportunity to engage with our target audience for the first time. After concluding a crash course in 3,000 years of Jewish history and culture, the students were split into teams to create a mini museum for the History 7 students to pair with their study of Judaism in World Religions. They chose to make exhibits on Jewish history, holidays, and languages. When building their museum, they grappled with word choice, engagement strategies, and clarity of information. The motto of the project was “it doesn’t matter if it makes sense to me, does it make sense to them?”, thus creating an authentic audience that mattered more than the teacher. Not only did this first mini museum experience offer the chance to practice articulating their learning to a younger audience, it also afforded them the opportunity to observe the behaviors and learning needs of their clients. They noticed that the young learners wanted to physically engage and did not have the stamina for reading long texts on the walls. They were drawn to objects, images, and hands-on activities. This information would work to inform the choices that would need to be made when designing the 7th grade experience in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, where it is not a space for play and interaction but serious learning and reflection. The goal of the next few months would be to prepare for that experience by becoming experts in the content and conscientious educators of their clients.
“[My partner and I] drafted questions to ask so we would have an idea of what specific things they were interested in. We also asked about their concerns so we knew what to avoid or how to prepare them for dense content. During our meetings, we also noticed that they were a little shy, so Maya and I made worksheets for them to write on throughout the museum so they could follow along silently if they preferred to do so.” ~Julia ‘25
To build their expertise, the students of HHB read Night by Elie Wiesel and every word of the textbook published by USHMM that covers the breadth of the history of the Holocaust. To reach the goal of understanding their clients, the seniors and the 7th graders had two lunches together to begin to build trust and familiarity with each other before the museum experience. The 7th grade teachers, Bishop, Kathy, and Elizabeth, gave advice to the HHB students about best practices when setting expectations with students and managing their small groups in the museum. The students poured over floorplans of the museum, selected key quotes to share on the tour, made decisions about what to highlight and what to skip, and identified a theme that they really wanted their clients to walk away with after the tour. The last step, which brought a significant amount of anxiety for the HHB students, was to go to the museum with their clients on April 14. Their anxiety was not due to a grade, it was a nervousness that came from the desire to do right by their young learners.
“I was thinking, daily, about what was most meaningful to me and what I wanted to teach other people.” ~Josh ‘25
“Success in this class, to me anyway, looks like some combination of two things: you will have learned something that you did not know before, and you will have found a passion and appreciation for the content you will have explored in the class. The former is inevitable, and if you achieve it, the latter is bound to follow. However, to what extent you achieve it is entirely up to you.” ~Graycen ‘25
The museum trip was simply magical. As I hovered around the groups, I heard intentionally designed themes of acts of resistance and resilience, survival of body and soul among dehumanizing circumstances, and holding space for the individual victim in the sea of millions. History was learned, yes, but I also heard life lessons about human behavior, both as a warning (groupthink and peer pressure) as well as a model (how one act of resistance can be a grain of sand disrupting the gears in a machine of harm). The seniors were prepared, passionate, and exceeded all expectations.
With this revision of past Legacy Project iterations, we were able to mitigate the challenge of delayed impact that comes with teaching. As educators, we know and understand that we do not always get to see the full impact of our work. As Hamilton sings in the hit musical, “What is a legacy? It’s planting a seed in a garden you never get to see”. However, our young teachers in HHB were able to see a bit of a seedling through the written reflections of the 7th graders after the tour. Even some of the students who were quiet throughout the tour showed that after some processing, their tour guides did have a tremendous impact on their knowledge of the Holocaust and understanding of its victims and survivors.
Here are some excerpts from the 7th grade reflections:
“I didn’t know a lot about the Holocaust, and thanks to my senior mentor, it made me even more curious.”
“While walking through the museum, I noticed many quotes that stuck out to me. But there is one in particular that I can say word for word right now– ‘Whomever shall save a single life saves the entire world’. We discussed the meaning behind the quote as a group, and [my senior] brought up another conclusion: If you save one person, you just saved their whole world. This to me was very impactful.”
“One thing that stuck with me was that even after the Jewish people were liberated, their lives were still not like they were before the war. I used to think that if they were liberated, everything would go back to normal, but now I know that was not the case.”
“One of the quotes that [impacted me the most] is ‘there weren’t 6 million murders but 1 murder 6 million times’.”
“After viewing the exhibits, I more fully understand why the Holocaust must remain a constant in school curriculums. By learning about atrocities, we ensure that we will not, in conscience, repeat them.”
“Something that I took away, and everyone should, is that everyone’s a human, no matter what race, country, or religion, and they should be treated like a human.”
“Going into the museum was a very eye-opening experience. Everything I knew about the Holocaust was from the internet, so being able to understand how cruel and evil the Nazis were was really powerful.”
I have witnessed many faces of pride in a classroom. A well-delivered presentation, returning a research paper with an A on the front, and a group of kids celebrating that their experiment worked. Never in my career did I have an experience like the day the seniors read their 7th grade student reflections. They wiped tears of joy from their eyes, sighed with satisfaction, smiled from ear to ear, and some even high-fived. It’s important to remember that these are second-semester seniors in mid-April, a time when school is traditionally the last priority as they prepare to graduate. The conversation immediately erupted into “If I were to do it again, I would have…” and requests to follow up with their clients to continue discussing areas of interest they indicated on their reflections.
The seniors echoed the purpose that they felt in the Legacy Project in their own end-of-year reflections:
“[The project] serves as a way of creating impact through knowledge, as our commitment to the course determines the level of impact and exposure we provide for the seventh graders.” ~Eli ‘25
“I think it is important, especially for this class to work with other grades to inspire the younger grades to at least explore this really important subject more, if not take the class.” ~Maya ‘25
“This project forces you to be able to take all the knowledge you have learned about the Holocaust and synthesize it and make it accessible to a younger audience, which improves your own skills at amalgamating information, but also improves your own understanding of the subject matter. It also grants the younger generation a nuanced perspective on an incredibly important topic.” ~Nathaniel ‘25
This project is just one example on our campus of ways that purposeful learning manifests in our community. The Humanities Symposium, held at the end of April, demonstrated the portfolio of work that seniors created in their English seminar courses. Our seniors are currently engaging in their Senior Capstone experience that they have been building toward throughout the school year. And while seniors are a common target for capstone experiences, the goal is to craft more opportunities for our students across the grade levels to engage in this type of purposeful work, intentionally woven throughout their school years. This aspiration is articulated in our Vision for Teaching and Learning as we aim for student ownership of their work that goes beyond the walls of the classroom and activates an interdisciplinary passion for learning that will leave an impact for years to come. Learn more about this educational journey through this video and these photos.
