Penn-Trafford High School’s faculty and administration stated that a graduation project challenges students to go beyond what is learned in the regular high school curriculum; the project allows students to explore a topic of interest through research, which concludes with a formal presentation.
English teacher Tami Thornton’s College Writing course is directed towards preparation for college-bound students, in the area of writing. The senior project requires students to create a digital magazine containing a variety of different writing pieces.
“The digital magazine was actually [former English teacher Gigi] Manuppellli’s idea,” Thornton explained. “She and I worked together to design the curriculum.”
Students used Canva to design the magazine, incorporating content from all the writing pieces they completed throughout the year — including personal narratives, analyses, descriptive writings and argumentative essays. The magazine needed to feature a creative cover, attention-grabbing headlines and maintain a strong focus on a theme decided by each student, usually their chosen career or degree.
“I encourage students to use their own voice in their writing,” Thornton said, “empowering them to engage critically with the world around them and to communicate with purpose and individuality.”
For English 12, however, students are required to write a senior research paper and base their presentation on it. In this paper, every student chose a topic of interest — either a potential career or passion. Starting in December, the class had to conduct research on three “cutting-edge aspects” — within each aspect, they had to find three credible sources that give information about that aspect. In total, students needed to have nine reliable sources and write 27 passages that are relevant to their source. Their senior research paper was due earlier in April.
“It has been beneficial for them to understand those topics more,” English teacher Taylor Oberdorf stated. “It just made them all more aware of things that they’re going to be looking into the next aspect of their lives as they leave here.”
For all classes — both English 12 and College Writing — students are required to present a 10-12 minute presentation that informs their classmates about all their research regarding their topic of the different aspects that they chose to look into with that topic.
Thornton said that the most memorable presentation she had in past years was when a student had a guest speaker who had been falsely convicted of murder and imprisoned for 10 years. Some example projects from the College Writing class of 2025 include: Jacob Mousseau, who gave an interactive presentation about writing; Nicholas Truschel, who discussed the topic of history and Kathryn Grant, who explained various aspects of space and astrophysics.
“I think this is a project that has been looked at with a lot of anxiety going into senior year,” Oberdorf added. “My best advice would be to not worry about it. Teachers walk students through this project, step by step… It’s not as scary as it seems.”
Abby Dreistadt, Editor in Chief