Leadership Opportunities

Strong mentors and female role models embolden Kent Place students to push themselves, pursue their passions. Mentorship is not just adults to students but woven throughout and between grades as well with such programs as:

• Peer Education in the Upper School - Twelfth graders mentor ninth graders.
• Triplet Groups in the Middle School - Sixth, seventh, and eighth-graders work together throughout the year.
• STEM Sisterhood - Primary and Middle School students collaborate together to work on informative and fun projects.

Ethics and leadership are woven throughout our curriculum and threaded through clubs, advisory groups, and summer programs. The Ethics Institute at Kent Place seeks to inspire ethical decision-making, preparing our students to be better citizens and leaders.

Peer leaders, club and publication leaders, sports captains, grade-level leaders and anyone holding a formal leadership position in the Upper School participate in an annual facilitation skills training. The goal of the training is to strengthen students' ability to create safe spaces for dialogue, build teams, collaborate, ask open-ended questions that engage their peers in fierce conversations, and bring healthy closure to a discussion where various differing perspectives may have been presented. These life-long human-relations skills are necessary for building thoughtful, responsive leaders.

Our nationally-recognized Girls' Leadership Institute holds summer programs for girls entering fourth through tenth grade that are designed to equip and empower participants for leadership opportunities throughout the year.
 

In the fifth grade, students design their own leadership ideas which helps our fifth graders prepare for the next chapter of their academic lives — Middle School. An example of a student-initiated project was the Fifth-Grade Lunch Bunch, where the fifth graders would rotate and eat with first and second graders to develop relationships and serve as role models. 

In this class, sixth graders gain a shared vocabulary and foundational knowledge from which the students can empower themselves and each other on their leadership journeys through Middle and Upper School. This course empowers young ethical leaders by helping them discover their leadership strengths while bolstering their leadership skills. As students explore different leadership styles, they will consider what their impact can be as leaders in their friend groups, schools and community. Topics covered include trust-building, definitions of leadership, qualities and skills, understanding your leadership strengths and challenges, observation and innovating, non-verbal communication and listening, formal and informal authority, decision-making styles, team-working and leadership styles, and, finally, legacy and impact.
 

History 8 embraces a thematic, interdisciplinary, and experiential approach to a number of interconnected aspects of social studies. The course covers a variety of disciplines including history, sociology, political and economic theory, comparative politics, economic, civics, ethics, debate, and media literacy, while centering around the role of representation in leadership. As students progress throughout the year, they will gain applicable content knowledge, critical thinking skills, and life tools necessary to become politically aware, competent, and engaged citizens in an increasingly complex world. Students will obtain a lens of analysis, to view historical events through an interdisciplinary perspective. Throughout the course, students will develop a foundational set of skills to analyze historical leaders and events both in America and around the world. Using their theoretic tool-kits, students will develop a solid understanding of the interconnectedness of politics, economics, and social progress in relation to the individual, society, and the world. Students will explore these themes in depth by comparing different countries’ systems of government, economic relations, and social institutions. Starting with the United States, students will analyze case studies ranging from countries in the European Union, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
 

What does it mean to be a leader? Is it the loudest voice, the quickest decision-maker, the most charismatic, the most well-informed, or the bravest? In this discussion-based seminar, students have the opportunity to explore and strengthen the multi-dimensional skills of leadership, including listening, collaborating, trusting, innovating, and communicating. Students are joined by KPS alumnae who have emerged as leaders in their own industries as the class seeks to identify mentors in their own journeys who can contribute to their growth. 
 

In this trimester course, students will be introduced to the values-based ethical decision-making model after a deep analysis of their own system of beliefs, including its origin, influences and challenges. Additionally, they will utilize some important ethical theories including the duty ethics of Immanuel Kant, the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill; ethical relativism; and virtue ethics of at least one of the following: Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and/or Confucius. Ethical theories will be applied and understood through the lens of current ethical issues, including civil discourse, big data, medical innovations and societal events. Questions considered may include: What is the good life? Do we have a moral duty to act in certain ways? Why? Does intention matter? How do we weigh benefits and harms? Are there such things as natural human rights? Are some values more compelling than others?
 

In this course, students will LEARN about themselves and others, how to LIVE a life of balance and joy, and LEAD others to do the same. Topics include diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, developing study skills, reproductive health, sexuality education, self-protection training, and responding to peer, family, and academic pressures. Students will also build personal resilience and develop self-regulation skills in addition to learning how to manage their nervous system using heart rate variability (HRV) technology.