For years, the freshman class has participated in the World Summit, an interactive social studies simulation. The activity provides an educational opportunity for freshmen to learn about global diplomacy while practicing debate skills with their peers.
However, due to the size of this year’s freshman class, a decision was made to modify the World Summit curriculum. As a result, the Class of 2029 will experience a different format than the sophomore, junior, and senior classes that preceded them.
Historically, the World Summit was an event that has been planned and hosted by the freshman social studies teachers. The event usually takes place in late May or early June in the school cafeteria. The entire freshman class has the opportunity to interact with each other whether they are at seminar, honors, or college prep levels.
To prepare for the summit, students formed groups, selected a country, and researched how a designated global issue affected their chosen nation. During the event, groups presented their research and debated opposing viewpoints.
The decision to modify was actually a long time coming according to Modern World History teacher Theresa DeCubellis, they officially made it last school year (2024-2025) but the discussion of changing the event had begun Pre-Covid times. The size of the freshman class had just been a factor in this year’s change, but turned out to be a very important one.
“It was very hard to maintain the focus of students for that length of time and to maintain decorum amongst that many students at once,” DeCubellis said.
In an interview with The Prowl, DeCubellis disclosed that planning for the summit always took a great amount of time. They would start after midterm exams and would spend hours over each month carefully preparing for what would be a,“3 hour lesson in June.”
“That time needed to be spent working on more interactive, student centered lesson plans for longer classes, common assessments, and curriculum writing,” DeCubellis said.
The past Junior and Senior classes (2027 and 2026) participated in the World Summit where the whole grade gets to interact with one another.
However the Sophomore class (2028) did a modified type of world summit where they pertained to their singular classes.While this did work much like the original world summit, it still took a lot of time for the social studies teachers to plan, and a lot of time to spend on a singular issue.
Now the freshman class (2029) will be transitioning to the idea of ATM (Alliances, Trade, Militarism) in shaping the geopolitical world tolday. Covering issues and current events such as the Israeli/Hamas conflict, the War in Iran, the War in Ukraine, along with China economic policies and more. This will be modeled in more of a class-type style.
While the school will technically preserve the tradition of the World Summit, the format will look markedly different from previous years and may continue to evolve in the future.
