The Best at Getting Better

The last week of school is always a festive one, featuring special events, celebrations, and closing ceremonies. Our younger students are looking forward to summer vacation, while our graduates are getting ready to head off to college. Although the campus will certainly be a quieter place next week without the students, the faculty will still be hard at work. We’ll be holding a Professional Development Week for all of our teachers, using this time to hone our craft and to look ahead to the future. I thought I’d share here some of the goals, activities, and highlights of the week.

Of course, some of our time will go toward meeting as divisions, departments, or grade level teams to close out this year and plan for next year. A particularly important set of meetings involves coordinating the transitions between the divisions, as we bring together the kindergarten and first grade teachers, fifth and sixth grade teachers, and eighth and ninth grade teachers to plan and converse. We are one school, and we want to ensure that the students’ experience in moving from any one division to the next is a smooth and positive one.

Other sessions focus on issues and trends in education and important opportunities and challenges that lie before us as a school. Teachers and administrators will lead and participate in “Planning for our Future” sessions, an opportunity for brainstorming, creative problem solving, and strategic planning. Our cross-divisional topics include:

• Learning Beyond Walls: Sustainability & Outdoor Education
• Reimagining Hillsdale: A Campus Tour & Dialogue
• Preparing for the Winter Diversity Conference: Vision to Action
• Seven Hills Portrait of a Learner: Applications in the Classroom

We’ll also have some division-specific conversations. In Upper and Middle School, teachers will be focusing on technology: they’ll be discussing the role of AI in teaching and learning, balancing their use of high-tech with low-tech or no-tech classroom activities, and transitioning their courses to Canvas, the new learning management system that will replace Schoology next year. In the Lower Schools, teachers will be training in project based learning as well as in literacy instruction. The Lower School teachers will also participate in sessions facilitated by our architects as we gather faculty input to refine the design of the Doherty Lotspeich Lower School.

These and other conversations allow us to look beyond the school day or even the school year, thinking about how Seven Hills can grow and evolve over a multi-year arc. All of these conversations tie into the content of our next five-year strategic plan, which I look forward to sharing with all of you in August.

We have also made time for the kinds of activities and experiences that we believe are as important for us grown-ups as they are for our students. For example, groups of teachers are engaging in on-campus and off-campus service work. A hardy group of volunteers will spend a morning restoring the creek system at the south end of the Hillsdale Campus, clearing invasive species and creating paths so that students can better study this ecosystem in their science classes. Another group will work with a local nonprofit, Scrap2Home, to create furniture for people transitioning into housing. Just as is true for the kids, we believe that this kind of volunteer work is a great way both to give back to the community and to build relationships with each other.

We are likewise raising our level of cultural competency by hosting a pair of workshops on the topics of Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Our administrators participated in these workshops last summer and fall and found them to be a powerful lens on how best to support our students and families. I know our faculty will find them powerful, too, as we seek to live out our school value of respecting diversity.

Like school itself, the week of professional development promises to be both educational and enjoyable, as we spend time together looking ahead to 2025-26 and beyond. Thank you for a great school year, and enjoy your summer!