Sarah Baker, Head of School, Tower Hill School

Tower Hill, an independent school serving students from ages 3 through 18, has centered its new strategic plan on redefining its program to meet the complexities of the world its students live in, focusing on cultivating the skills for genuine, original creation across all academic disciplines and prioritizing social and emotional learning. “It is our job as adults to help students confront the moment in a way that leverages the newness around them to bring them closer to the beauty of an independent school experience and not farther away from it,” Head of School Sarah Baker told Invest:.

What is the strategic direction for Tower Hill?

We’re a school that serves 3-year-olds through 18-year-olds, with a typical total enrollment of about 860. When the school writes a strategic plan, which was done two years ago, it seeks to write a plan for all of those children, from the littlest to the biggest, from their first experience with school through the last moment that they’re with us before they go off to exciting success in college. What we’re about right now is implementing a strategic plan that treats each of those students like true scholars, people who have the capacity to create original, insightful work products. This is especially important in an age in which we’re all grappling with how best to use artificial intelligence. 

At the core of our strategic plan we ask how we can facilitate the development of research skills and academic confidence and put students in places where they’re doing real inquiry and creating authentic work products. By that, I don’t just mean in the science classroom, which is what you might immediately think of when you hear research and investigation and creation. I mean it in the music studio and the fine arts classroom and the English classroom and all other classrooms as well.

Our other and very much related focus is asking ourselves how we can make Tower Hill a destination employer for the best scholars and practitioners in the field. You can see how the two are connected. We’ve done a lot recently with respect to our benefits and our compensation, and what it means to live and work and be a part of this community, to draw the best individuals into our classrooms to work with our incredible students.

We all know from our schooling that what matters most is the person at the front of the room and next to you as you refine your work, the teacher who’s making this happen for you.

In what ways is the student experience evolving to reflect the needs of an increasingly complex and fast-paced world?

There’s a lot conspiring against students now, and some of these things are also the very tools or innovations that present them opportunities. The complexity is hard for students to navigate and understand. It is our job to make them sturdy in the face of the evolving social fabric and evolving social challenges, like the omnipresence of social media and AI. They live their lives publicly and consultatively in a way that we never did as we were growing up. And they live their lives connected in a way that we never could.

We want them to be up close and personal with the experience of school and community and each other. If not managed well, these forces in their lives can increase the space between them and their communities, them and their scholarship. The wonder of the school years is that it is a time when children and adolescents can pursue the broadest range of exploration and can be lit on fire by new ideas and wonderful people introducing you to new ideas. They can move with the power of their inhibition and discover gifts that they didn’t know they had. It is our job as adults to facilitate that and to protect it.

It is also our job as adults to help students confront or meet the moment in a way that leverages the newness around them to bring them closer to the experience and not farther away from it, not to be sort of burrowed into a phone or overly concerned about perceptions externally.

Most schools are doing things like taking cellphones out of the hands of kids, and we are doing that also. But I think it’s not enough. We’re asking ourselves how the classroom experience can truly engage students. How can we make that a more compelling alternative to what could be happening on the phone?

How do you approach that balance between technology, like AI integration, but also honoring traditional education?

We’re proud of what the school has done since 1919. We are ranked annually as the best K-12 school in Delaware, and we think that’s a real feather in our cap. However, we also realize the peril in resting on that laurel.

We win state championships, produce an extraordinary number of national merit semifinalists and commended scholars, and see AP scores that are off the charts. All of those things are data, and all of those things make us proud of what our students get to accomplish and experience here. What we have asked ourselves, however, is what data we need to collect to ensure that we have a healthy school, a school where the social and emotional learning is happening, and where the happiness quotient is high.

What we know is that if those are unmet needs, kids might still perform, but they can’t do so as whole and healthy people, taking with themselves everything from this experience that they could. And notably, they also won’t perform as well as they could and would if they felt like they truly mattered to the institution and community. We have a robust annual system of surveying our students and our faculty and our parents about their emotional health in the community, the power of their voice in the community, and their feelings of belonging in the community. We began this process last school year. We were happy with what we found about our kids’ well-being, but we are also challenging ourselves to design intentional changes to our program to address the inevitable needs students reflected in their survey responses.

How is Tower Hill rethinking student preparation for the next stage of life?

We could be bigger than we are, and we are holding ourselves purposefully small because we believe that the intimacy of this experience is one of the keys to its effectiveness. We are preparing students to lead good lives, not just to get into “good schools”. I find it of critical importance that our students learn how to be good community members in a right-sized community where they can feel powerful at their young ages. We also have an extraordinary athletic program at Tower Hill, and we teach our kids how to be productive, constructive members of teams, how to win gracefully, and lose gracefully as well. All of this is part of the education, expressly part of the curriculum.

Alongside this and because of this, we have taken our social-emotional learning program to new heights. We know it’s more typical in a school for the social-emotional learning to happen around the edges and by happenstance. To ensure that this is not the case at Tower Hill, we formed a Social Emotional Learning Department with a Chair and resources that match those of our other academic departments. We track the hours we’re spending on social-emotional learning and increase them annually. This demonstrates the commitment we have made to ensuring that our students are learning how to be productive, constructive members of communities, learning to regulate themselves, to tune into themselves, understand their emotions, and speak to their emotions. The results that we’re seeing are incredible.