Embracing the Great Unknown: Agnes Irwin Prepares Girls for an Unpredictable Future

By Elizabeth Weinstein

Dr. Elizabeth Rossini recalls often a saying from educator and author Arthur L. Costa: It’s not what students know that matters; it’s what they do when they don't know that matters.

This way of thinking — of helping learners navigate unfamiliar situations — has become core to Agnes Irwin’s pedagogy, embodied in one of its guiding principles, “Teach for the Unknown.”

Rossini and her faculty colleagues see this rallying cry as reflecting both Agnes Irwin’s strategic plan, which calls the school to intellectual curiosity and courageous leadership, and the urgency of readying students to navigate a complicated, evolving world as adults.

“A big part of our work is thinking carefully about what we’re preparing our students for,” explained Rossini, AIS’s Assistant Head of School. “What is their future going to look like? To understand that, we pay attention to what’s happening both in education and outside of it, globally. We look at the skills students will need.”

These competencies now propel Agnes Irwin’s curricular planning. Rossini described the curriculum framework used with teachers as “freedom within structure,” an arrangement she likened to a “big, beautiful sandbox with all the tools you need, but it has a frame that keeps the sand in.”

Navigating a ‘Lake’

Today’s educators are living — and innovating — through what Rossini calls a liminal, or hinge, moment. In addition to the typical pressures youth face in school and at home, Generation Alpha has come of age alongside fast-evolving artificial intelligence, environmental consequences of climate change, and uncertain geopolitics.

“Things are changing so rapidly; I sometimes describe it like swimming in a lake,” Rossini said. “A lake is different from an ocean — there’s muck on the bottom, cloudy water, lots of plants. You can’t see what’s ahead. That’s what designing learning feels like right now.”

AIS encourages faculty to wade into the lake and dive ahead with confidence in their ability to face any moment head-on, “for which our teachers are well-equipped and committed,” she added.

“We have to acknowledge the context our students are living in today: the mental health crisis, the influence of social media, the constant presence of phones and TikTok,” she said. “We’re trying to prepare girls academically within an environment that is affecting young people in significant ways.”

For Rossini, teaching for the unknown means making sure “our students have the voice, the confidence, and the grit to face a never-before-seen, complex, messy problem. I want them to see something unfamiliar and not shy away from it. I want them to think, ‘I’ve got this’ — and then pull from their tool belt whatever skills they need.”

The Support Team

Championing much of the work are members of Agnes Irwin’s Teaching, Learning and Innovation team: Julie Diana and Jake Greenberg. They work collaboratively with faculty to cultivate classrooms where students can wrestle with open-ended problems, revise thinking, and explain reasoning to one another, teachers, and even outside audiences.

Diana, who has been at AIS for 23 years, became interested in metacognition after a session at a school library conference. “I began thinking about how to help students reflect on the research process, and that interest eventually expanded into other areas of teaching and learning,” she said.

“A lot of what students experience now doesn’t look like what school was designed for,” Diana said. “Technology is changing rapidly; cognitive overload is real; students are overwhelmed by information and expectations. We want girls to engage actively, make discoveries, face friction, and struggle a little — because that’s learning. Those moments build agency.”

For Greenberg, who came to AIS in 2022, the biggest shift he’s experienced is “understanding that the future is inherently uncertain. We used to think we could prepare students for a fairly predictable set of expectations. Now technology, AI especially, is developing so fast that the future feels less like a path and more like an evolving landscape.”

Meanwhile, he added, “Students are conditioned to ‘check boxes’ for college. They think success means hitting certain markers. But the world they’re entering may reward something very different. Part of teaching for the unknown is helping them unlearn helplessness and learn how to approach questions without obvious answers.”

Shaping the TLI team’s efforts, Greenberg said, is Agnes Irwin’s Portrait of a Graduate, which lists seven essential outcomes for its students: “These are the core skills students need to succeed in a rapidly evolving world, and the Portrait of a Graduate gives us common language to map those skills onto curriculum and assessments.”

AIS also calls upon a set of interdisciplinary tools developed over years:

• Its leadership curriculum helps students understand who they are, what they have to say, and how to thrive in community with others.
• The girl-centered principles from the Center for the Advancement of Girls emphasize voice, choice, clarity, relevance, balance, and connection.
• And the AIS Principles of Civil Discourse teach students how to communicate better with those who hold different beliefs.

“Students need to feel that who they are, at their core, matters more than their achievements,” Rossini said. “We can be unapologetically academic and unapologetically caring.”

Empowered Students

AIS classes have shifted from a teacher-centered model of education toward a student-centered one: Gone are the days of a “sage on the stage,” rows of desks, and lots of lectures.

A Thanksgiving Balloon Parade unit in second grade brings together social studies, library research, robot programming in the iWonder Lab, and collaborative art design. Combine these disciplines with youthful creativity, and there’s no predicting the marvelous balloons that will take flight.

And in the Middle School, seventh-graders’ input determines the subject of an elective, with the teacher then building a lesson plan to develop the takeaway competencies each student will need. The course is never the same twice.

Innovation in the classroom, in other words, doesn’t always mean new technology or tools.

“Much of the innovation in schools is structural and hard to show,” Diana said. “It's in how a teacher runs discussion-based classes or how students solve problems collaboratively with multiple methods, instead of following one formula. Even changing the classroom layout, with students at whiteboards and the teacher in the middle, fundamentally shifts who does the thinking.”

Upper School science teacher Manjuli Gupta asks her sophomores in Honors Chemistry to conduct a full research review on a scientific topic of their choice that has not been covered in class. The students then present their findings to classmates. For many, the assignment will be their first deep exploration of a wholly new area.

“Students push themselves to become content experts,” Gupta said. “The project demands critical thinking, interdisciplinary research and time management — all highly transferable skills, no matter what fields they pursue.”

How to ‘Fail Forward’

The updated curriculum also brings forward other skills, such as greater confidence, collaboration, and willingness to take intellectual risks, Greenberg noted.

For instance, a popular fifth-grade project, the Robot Petting Zoo, has students design and program cardboard animals using block coding and sensors. But struggle and frustration are part of the process, too.

The goal, explained computer science teacher Ashley Powers, is to build “a tolerance for ambiguity and setbacks. We talk about ‘failing forward’ — using what we learn from missteps to make an even better product.”

These principles of what is commonly called “design thinking” come up again and again as a student moves through the AIS curriculum.

Mary-Tyler Upshaw, a STEAM specialist and robotics coach for the Lower and Middle schools, says her students “begin to understand that iteration, testing, improving, and trying again are not just allowed but essential.”

When students know that the expectation is to try, revise, and explain their thinking, “they rise to it,” Diana added. “It also makes learning more joyful — they feed off one another’s energy.”

Ultimately, the deliberate design of these learning engagements helps students build the habits they’ll draw on when the path ahead is unclear.

“We’re doing innovative work with our students,” Rossini said, “but even more importantly, we’re helping them develop the agency they need to navigate the unknown.”