Students at MA develop the intellectual and creative toolkit to live life to its fullest.
Profound changes in the workplace and in the social fabric demand additional fluencies in problem solving, collaboration, and global citizenship. We have developed a deeply researched understanding of the competencies that students will need to lead and thrive in a rapidly evolving world.
Every facet of an MA education is designed to help students develop these five core competencies:
Students utilize cross-cultural awareness and emotional intelligence to understand and appreciate difference, privilege, and their connection to others in a global community with integrity and gratitude.
Students work both collaboratively and individually to embrace academic and intellectual challenge, using multiple perspectives and evidence to support, challenge, and refine their arguments. They can persuade—using evidence based on sound research—and they can be persuaded to change their minds.
Students effectively articulate their ideas, feelings, and passions through arts and languages, and are proficient in multiple modes of written, oral, artistic, and media communication and presentation.
Students use a growth mindset and reflection to collaborate, courageously engage, and take healthy risks to gain confidence, leadership, and resilience. They are biased toward action, and use their educational and other gifts toward impacting their communities and the world.
How do we do it?
To assist our students in developing and strengthening these competencies, our program—academic and co-curricular—focuses on the following:
Creativity thrives when an educational environment fosters varied approaches to tasks and minimizes, at all costs, student intellectual self-censorship.
Critical thinking is a mode of engaging with any content in an analytical and reflective way, where the thinker seeks to understand through an expansive examination of the subject’s or problem’s existing characteristics and larger contextual relationships.
Intellectual challenge encourages students to cultivate their curiosity; to take risks with their thinking and to learn from failure and perseverance; to open up new perspectives and possibilities; to focus on how to find an answer more than what the presumed right answer may be.
Transdisciplinary learning begins with questions and issues, and, while leaning on traditional disciplinary understanding, moves beyond the scope of disciplinary skill and content to generate novel responses to complex real-world issues.
Wholistic education is a holistic approach providing opportunities for cognitive, social, emotional, physical, creative, and ethical development in a variety of venues and experiences.
MA seniors have the chance to reflect on their time at MA in a senior speech shared with the entire student body. Every speech ends with specific appreciation for the teachers and students that have shaped that senior’s experience. And a few tears often are shed as students consider what their time at MA has meant in their journey to becoming compassionate citizens of our world.
We are not simply preparing a student for a particular stage in life, but our education is for life. From that point of view, we imagine that we are educating students to be collaborators, to be leaders, and to be people who care about making the world a better place.