The Loomis Chaffee curriculum is updated annually to incorporate new courses and redesign old ones. Each year, during the course selection period, students seek to identify not only the adjustments being made for the upcoming academic year but also the reasoning behind those choices.
Mr. Lawrence, Dean of Academics and Curriculum, revealed the processes behind how new courses are proposed and passed. Firstly, a student curriculum committee, including all the department heads, attended monthly meetings to review each department's work. In the November meeting, new courses were proposed and debated. Then, the committee voted for these proposals in December, and the approved courses were implemented for the 2025-2026 school year.
“Most of… the courses that are proposed in November tend to be voted in [through] the careful work that departments are doing…[ensuring] that the teachers who have proposed it are very interested in running it, and they have worked with their department to think carefully about that proposal,” Mr. Lawrence said.
However, there are often cases when courses don’t make it out of the planning board.
“There might be a handful [of courses] that are not voted to move forward, usually because there’s uncertainty about whether it would be broadly appealing to our students [to the point where] we think it would run,” said Mr. Lawrence.
In the English department, English IV: Satire has been changed to a non-CL elective, and CL English IV: Literary Adaptation and Reinvention, a GESC course, has been added to the list of term courses available to seniors. The term course English IV: Literature of Scientific Discovery has been temporarily removed.
When asked about the rationale behind these changes, Dr. Jane Wanninger, Head of the English Department, explained, “With the senior term electives, we are always looking to let the program evolve; it’s not meant to remain static.”
She added, “All the classes we put on the books we put because we think they’re interesting, teachers are excited to teach them, and we hope students will want to take them. But just to keep things fresh, we’re always considering at least subbing something out and adding something new to let the students keep exploring.”
Regarding the removal of literature on scientific discovery, Dr. Wanninger said, “Because there are new senior writing seminars on communicating science and on algorithms and AI, we thought that student interest in writing and science had some other outlets on the senior level and we were kind of excited to think about readapting a sci-fi class or something similar to that for the future.”
“I’m excited for when I’ll be able to take these new courses, because I came to Loomis for their wide array of programs,” Eva Borges ’28 said, echoing many other Loomis students’ sentiments. “I’d love more options to advance my academic journey here!”