About Seven Hills

Why Seven Hills?

I love all children, except for boys.
Lewis Carroll

Grade school is largely a feminine environment, populated predominantly by women teachers and authority figures, that seems rigged against boys, against the higher activity level and lower level of impulse control that is normal for boys. As one disappointed boy remarked unhappily at the end of his first day of school: “You can’t do anything!” The trouble wasn’t really that he couldn’t do anything, of course, but that everything he loved to do—run, throw, wrestle, climb—was outlawed in the classroom. In this setting a boy’s experience of school is as a thorn among roses; he is a different, lesser, and sometimes frowned-upon presence and he knows it.
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson

At Seven Hills we enlist faculty and staff who have a special love for boys and who are delighted by the middle years of a boy’s life. Imagine the educational possibilities in a setting where educators welcome the spirit that boys bring into the classroom—boys who keep their bodies in perpetual motion, boys who are bored in half the time, boys who consume twice the space.

In American education, the assessment of student performance inordinately influences curriculum and methods of instruction. From kindergarten to graduate school, educators teach to the test. The transformed middle grade school will require new assessment approaches that promote disciplined inquiry among young adolescents.
TURNING POINTS: The Report of the Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents
Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development

At Seven Hills, we have the opportunity to create from the ground up an environment that values one-on-one learning. Teachers are encouraged to reduce teaching time in the front of the classroom and work side by side with each student during class periods. Learning assessments employed at Seven Hills are selected for their ability to individualize learning strategies for each student. Tests that are incorporated in the Seven Hills community will function as learning exercises that deepen the learning experience rather than generate performance-based comparisons.

Here are ten areas that brain-based research reflects critical differences in learning-styles between boys and girls: Deductive and Inductive Reasoning, Abstract and Concrete Reasoning, Use of Language, Logic and Evidence, Likelihood of Boredom, Use of Space, Physical Movement, Sensitivity and Group Dynamics, Use of Symbolism, and Use of Learning Teams.
Boys and Girls Learn Differently! A Guide for Parents and Teachers
Michael Gurian

Seven Hills is founded on the very real belief that the differences between girls and boys are significant enough to support a model school committed to instruction and learning methods based on current research as it reflects the hearts and minds of boys in the middle years. Research clearly points to the benefits in critical thinking and collaborative learning for boys in schools where class size, classroom space and layout, schedule and structure of the day, opportunity for movement, and full sensory instruction are reexamined. Few schools can make such sweeping changes. Public schools can rarely consider the value of grouping students along gender lines. Seven Hills can be a model school on the front end of a national movement exploring the connections between boys and learning.

The goal in the brief time we have together, to learn everything we can about purposes, genres, techniques, ideas, feelings, themselves, their worlds…. Most importantly, I take off the top of my head and
[learn] in front of them…. I show them how I plan, change my mind, confront problems, weigh options, make decisions, use conventions and [deviate] to compose my life.
In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning
Nancie Atwell

At Seven Hills, a teacher is called upon to model curiosity based on her or his own spirit of inquiry. Teachers delight in the wonders of every boy’s achievement, from his slightest observations to his most stunning feats. Learning is fun at Seven Hills because the joy of learning is modeled throughout the community. High fives are common at Seven Hills and are considered an appropriate gesture when boys make connections across the curriculum and link experiences.

All of these ideas sound great. The research is compelling, but other schools have access to the same studies. Some even make the same claims on paper that Seven Hills is proposing.
How is Seven Hills any different?
Prospective parent

Seven Hills has more than vision and innovation. Seven Hills has two transforming gifts that will help it to deliver on its promises. First, Seven Hills is small. Second, Seven Hills is new.

Committed to a class ratio not to exceed 16 students, Seven Hills can be and do what so many schools can only dream of achieving. Seven Hills believes firmly that class size matters and that smaller is better.

Many of the families who have been instrumental in the creation of Seven Hills School have historic ties and commitment to public schools and are clear in their hopes that Seven Hills graduates will be positioned to return to public high schools. Indeed, Seven Hills School’s greatest supporters are committed to teaching the public values on which foundations of education must be built.

Still it is clear to the Seven Hills Board of Directors, Head of School, faculty, and staff that the most vital changes necessary for transforming classroom settings, learning experiences, and boys in the middle years can more easily occur in settings where the community can create from the ground up, based on the finest, most credible research available. Being new is a plus at Seven Hills.