Academic Overview

Academics to inform
your future

At Walker’s, learning is a vigorous journey where students and educators challenge one another to grow intellectually.

Students learn to identify real-world challenges and create solutions while developing the skills that are essential for college, career, and global citizenship. Our learners take intellectual risks through persistence and resilience which helps them improve and grow as life-long learners. Ultimately, wisdom is gained through experience, mastery, and reflection.

We recognize that learning is greatly impacted by social interaction so central to teaching and learning at Walker’s is the development of deep and lasting relationships within the community. Social connections, formed within a culture of respect and trust, enable students’ individual growth and enhance our students’ understanding of their potential to affect those around them — and themselves.   

At Walker’s, we believe that demonstrable skills are the best measure of learning including literacy, critical thinking, a global perspective, taking initiative, leadership, collaboration, communication, and creativity.

Explore Our Upper School Curriculum
Meet Our Faculty

Our Philosophy of Learning

UPPER SCHOOL

Knowledge will always be important, but what you do with that knowledge is even more important. Walker’s high academic standards stretch students to the place where they are motivated to direct their own learning. Our faculty guide students as they develop essential skills to meet challenges and opportunities today — and in the future — in whatever areas of interest they choose to pursue.

MIDDLE SCHOOL

At The Ethel Walker Middle School, we place girls at the center of our educational design process. Girls thrive in our classrooms because they are afforded a sense of agency and a platform where they develop their voices and learn how to use them effectively to have a say in their own education. Math, science, history, English, creative arts, and world languages (Latin, Spanish, or French) are the core of the Walker’s Middle School curriculum.

Middle School Academics

News

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Signature Courses

Honors Research Seminar
Visiting Writer Seminar
Inequality in the U.S.
Tropical Ecology lab
Advanced Multivariable Calculus class
Latin class

Honors Research Seminar

Walker’s is among only five high schools in the United States invited to participate in the Tiny Earth Network (TEN), an innovative program formulated at Yale University that encourages students to pursue careers in science through hands-on and real-world experience.

Visiting Writer Seminar

In Walker’s Visiting Writer Seminar, students have the special opportunity to immerse themselves in a study of one writer’s works. The course culminates with a visit by that person to the school for a series of master classes and a public reading to our community.

Inequality in the U.S.

Inequality in the United States introduces students to systems of social inequality in the United States. Students investigate the structural, interpersonal, and social dimensions of oppression.

Tropical Ecology

Tropical Ecology is designed to provide students with a general understanding of tropical ecology and conservation and to enhance student research skills.

Advanced Multivariable Calculus

Advanced Multivariable Calculus covers topics that are not currently included in a traditional high school calculus course but may be included in a college-level calculus course.

Holding Out for a Hero

In this yearlong course, students explore Roman ideas of loyalty, loss and leadership through Virgil’s text. Through a study of meter, word order, poetic device, and vocabulary, the course grapples with the themes of love and death, war and refugees, family, and fate.

Academic Advising

AdvisingWalker’s advisory program recognizes that a strong faculty-student relationship is an essential component of growth and development for every student. Through academic and social conversations throughout their time at Walker’s, advisors become transformative adults in the lives of our students.

Each Walker’s student in our Upper and Middle School is placed in a small advisory group composed of peers in grades 9–12 or in grades 6–8. Led by a Walker’s faculty member or administrator, these groups are units in which a student receives academic advice, learns about other cultures and forms lifelong friendships.

Advisors work with each of their advisees to form an academic plan and to sign up for courses. Serving as liaisons between students, families, and faculty members, advisors communicate frequently with families to provide updates on academic and social progress. When necessary, advisors take the lead on setting up academic support for advisees, whether in the form of extra help, peer tutoring, or professional tutors. Advisors also often serve as social support, ensuring that each advisee feels cared for and comfortable in classes, residence halls or on teams.

Through the advisory program, Walker’s recognizes that each student is an individual with their own goals and possibilities. While encouraging self-advocacy, advisors support students in the achievement of these goals.

Middle School Advisory

In Their Words

There is a great relationship between the advisor and student, but also between the advisor and parent. We don’t allow any child to fall through the cracks.

—Suzanne Piela P’22, '28, Science Faculty