Click here to listen to this week’s JAM – Designing Our Program.
This past week, Upper School Head Mike Peller and I had the opportunity to connect with Denise Pope, Stanford professor in the Graduate School of Education, co-founder of Challenge Success, and author of the bestseller, Doing School. Denise, and Challenge Success, are focused on helping schools develop programs that redefine success emphasizing well-being and engagement, not just grades and test scores. As the research she and others have done consistently shows, many schools are creating stressed out, anxious, and overworked students who are also woefully unprepared for the challenges of college and life. Put simply, the traditional model hasn’t worked.
Denise has done a great deal of work with some of the leading schools in the Bay Area and across the country, including many of our peer schools such as Castilleja, Menlo School, and Nueva. We asked Denise to offer us some early feedback on our developing program, including the early design of our schedule, our approach to assessment, and some of our signature programs, including our Hillbrook Advanced Studies program and Reach Beyond Immersives. I will dive into these programs in more detail in future episodes, but for the sake of this episode, I wanted to share a few insights she had. First, she was excited to see that our schedule design follows the overwhelming research about high school students and sleep by prioritizing a later start time (right now, we have it set at 8:45 am). She also applauded the use of a block schedule, with longer periods and fewer classes in a day, allowing for greater depth and more meaningful experiences. She was excited to see we are in line with other leading schools, who are moving away from the rapid fire, unengaging, rote learning experiences that have defined high school education for far too long
She noted our language around a more flexible experience for 11th and 12th graders and shared an example from a school she knew where a student had turned a school-based internship with a cryptocurrency company into a paid summer opportunity that was extending into the coming school year. The point that I took from her? Our schools should provide pathways for students to engage in the real world in meaningful ways now. High school students are ready for real learning now, they don’t need to just “do school” while they wait for the real world to come later.
We are excited to partner with Denise and other educational leaders in the months ahead as we design our program. It is incredibly inspiring to have educational leaders at the forefront of best practices in schools offering insight into how we can make sure that Hillbrook will be a model for what school can and should look like.