All Four One

By Amy Goldwasser

While other schools have multiple deans, Miss Hall’s has designed a next-generation model for these four positions — Deans of Teaching & Learning, of Student Life, of and of Wellness — where they continually overlap and inform each other to better serve students through the complexity and individuality of today’s challenges. The highly collective, intricately connected power of the four deans is in recognizing and honoring the whole student. There is no classroom learning without also gaining knowledge in self-care and sleep, in cultural understanding and community, in showing up and cooling down, in the Dining Room and the photography studio, the family discussion and the friend group.

“Because this is a high school, no situation is simple,” says Head of School Julia Heaton. “When I witness the deans in flow, they’re able to look at a situation from a holistic point of view. They can see this student as having a particular experience based on every aspect of who they are and how they’re engaging with a course or peer or challenge.”

To fully understand students and support them where they are in real time, the deans meet daily, serve on each other’s committees, and share a deep commitment to exploring and advancing all the ways their specific areas of expertise come together for the students. What will help them thrive? Let’s make sure their advisor touches base this afternoon. Are the parents looped in? How do they process written versus oral learning styles? How do we show them their potential for leadership? How do we support them when they hear tough news? Who do they trust most? Where do they find quiet? When are practices? When are schedules conflicting or overwhelming? Let’s call a team meeting of every adult who works with this student.

“Wellness and cross-cultural differences in learning and respect are embedded in the classroom,” says Rebecca Cook-Dubin P’24, Director of Academic Advising. She’s continually collaborating with the deans across their areas of expertise, from helping keep a student who’s on medical leave on track academically so they can arrive back to campus in a less challenging way, to the DE&I considerations inherent to her classes on fairy tales and literature and censorship. In January, when returning students start to make decisions about the following school year, she says of the deans, “We’re all working together in course selection, and we’re really aware of, for every single student, exactly who’s taking on what,” ranging from what sports and clubs they’re engaged with to how they manage stress to that freshman year disciplinary situation to who they’re thinking of rooming with. “We can help them see their resources and options as widely and visually as possible to reflect in advance,” she says. “We can all align with them to answer their big question of Who do I want to be next year?”

Rising senior Noya Samara ’26 says she experiences and appreciates Miss Hall’s whole student approach in helping her navigate the demands of academics (including five Hallmark Courses this fall) with student life (including three seasons of varsity sports: volleyball, basketball, softball). She also served as head of DIVCO, the Diversity Coalition, with two other students, working closely with “Ms. LJ” (Paula Lima Jones, Dean of Equity & Inclusion) and Kristen Milano, Dean of Wellness, as well as the school nurses, to reform the structured Jet Lag Policy for the school into a case-by-case determination of recovery time. “We noticed it was inequitable,” she says, “where limited amounts of rest were allowed, and they were all based on ‘a distance greater than six time zones.’ ” The solution they found together — incorporating DE&I and wellness, “making sure any changes were equitable and healthy” with academics and student life — was an individualized approach that factors in the adults who know them well. Each student would consult with the nurses, and sometimes deans and other faculty, to create a personalized strategy for their return from travels.

Julia is emphatic that these are “not just academic skills we’re teaching.” She offers some integral examples of wellness, DE&I, and student life informing academics: “You’ll write a better history paper if you can represent different perspectives and reconcile conflicting points of view. You learn from living in a dorm with students from 20 different countries and needing to be a citizen of that community at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. How do I learn self-regulation, practices like breathing and reflection? How does physical activity make me feel better when I get stressed? How do I apply compassion, self-awareness and listening differently in the dorm than I do in the classroom?”

Julia says, “our Strategic Design and vision is all directed toward sending out into the world the kinds of graduates who are highly competent and ready to do what they’re going to do. This is school at its best.”

Four most-experts in complex collaboration and connection share every day strategies for practicing individual — and community — support the Miss Hall’s way

“Here’s an interesting thing about the diversity of our student body,” says Paula M. Lima Jones, Dean of Equity and Inclusion. “Something as universal as conflict is cultured. You’re negotiating a cross-cultural dialogue.”

One person, Dean Lima Jones says, might be coming from a more collectivist approach (“Harmony in the room is for the better of the community, so it will be better for me.”), where the other brings an individualist perspective (“I’m not happy here, which isn’t making me a good community member.”). Someone who was “giving subtle clues all along” may need help and encouragement in speaking up. Their equally well-meaning “clear is kind” peer may need support in the inverse, to “say less, listen more.”

She emphasizes that “It’s really important to approach conflict with a sense of it’s not all or nothing,” where each party is able to recognize “I can have disagreements with you, and we can still find ways to be in community together.”

Toward finding mutual (and self-) understanding, Dean Lima Jones offers some questions to consider before engaging in healthy human conflict:

• What is my investment in the relationship with this person? Have we had a long history together and we're facing a bump? Or, is our relationship casual? Transactional?

• How do I want to show up in this moment? What do I need in this situation? Particularly for people with marginalized identities: to what extent is my identity or identities a major variable in the conflict?

• Is this a resolution for the right now? Or, for when I’ve had some time to take care of self and reflect on the dynamic? Are you willing to put significant work into sustaining the peace, or is it OK, we need a quick fix?

• Regardless of the outcome, how can I walk away feeling as whole as possible? Even if the other person never heard me and never opened their mind to my experience? How can I feel that I gained something, even if that was my own voice?

“Who are our Hallmark Courses for?” It’s a powerful, open-ended question that Dean of Teaching & Learning Meghan Smith says Miss Hall’s leadership really opened up and interrogated in their visionary academic work. “Are they inclusive? Equitable? Is our highest-level, most rigorous curriculum serving our students well?”

What surfaced in their research and data was that Black and Latine students were disproportionately underrepresented in Hallmark classes in comparison with the student body. “We discovered that somewhere in there we were creating inequities,” says Dean Smith. “So we immediately committed to creating more inroads.”

Here are some of Dean Smith's starting points for rethinking and recalibrating systems for greater equity:

• Question everything. “Is every student seeing themselves reflected in the coursework?” says Dean Smith, “is an entirely different question from, ‘Does every student have entry points?’” The key to considering every individual and their wellness and sense of belonging and larger student life that’s inherent to their learning is to ask questions of every facet of the existing model. “Should we limit the number of Hallmark classes a student can take so they don’t get overwhelmed?”

• Welcome change. Inequities, more often than not, enter systems where people do. “Who was applying? Who was getting in?” Dean Smith asks. The team quickly found a barrier to entry, for example, in that the application process called for students to submit samples of their work, but they didn’t have a significant opportunity to add their voices, and there wasn’t a systemic way for more than one faculty member to consider them. Now the students can create a portfolio, answer questions about their passions, and submit two artifacts—which are reviewed by the entire department, not just the teacher, with thoughtful, personalized discussion around who’s ready and how to support them in success.

“Mental health is so directly correlated with our connections to other people,” says Dean of Wellness Kristen Milano. “Miss Hall’s is a connection-based school, where students experience real feelings of support and being included, from trusted adults who they know care about their wellbeing as much as their academics, and from their peers.” She cites the 90 percent overall wellbeing index of Miss Hall’s students, five points above the national average, in this year’s annual wellness survey. “That’s why we do so well.”

As most any parent, teacher, or even teenager can confirm, however, engaging teenagers in the kinds of meaningful conversations that foster this sense of honesty, vulnerability and connection is a challenge that defies inquiries of the How-was-your-day? kind.

Here Dean Milano shares some questions with the specificity to naturally open up dialogue with a young person. “Then listen without judgment to their answers,” she says. “They might need to vent or complain or confide. They might need to just name something and try it on for themselves.” She adds that not reacting is often the only right reaction. “Really what it’s teaching you is how to sit with the emotions of a teenager and not go into solve mode, which is hard to do.”

• Who did you connect with today?

• What’s something that made you feel proud of yourself?

• What was something that challenged you?

• Who or what made you laugh?

• Who did you turn to or who did you trust to help you with something you didn’t want to deal with or experience alone?

In Student Life — and in life out there in general — the battle against burnout is real. “If you’re a young person who’s curious and energized and learning about the world, which is what we all want our kids to be, you have this voice that says, ‘It’s so engrained and required for me to gather as many experiences and perspectives as possible,’” says Nikki Buccello, who joined Miss Hall’s in July as Dean of Student Life. “And that’s wonderful. But then your midterms are coming up at the same time you’re in playoffs at the same time you’re practicing your Spanish for a trip to Mexico, and you know you’re not up to capacity to deliver.”

Dean Buccello suggests some approaches to recognizing, honoring, and maintaining a healthy balance between the ambitious pursuit of and essential care of self:

• Counter culture. The default setting of the world we live in is always going to be do more, take on more. “You hear it everywhere, this boast of I stayed up ’til four in the morning,” Dean Buccello says. Not to give into its pull calls for handle-with-care countermessaging. “Is that something you should be proud of?” she asks. “You want to be very intentional in fighting the impression that especially a young person isn’t doing what needs to be done if they’re not up all night.” It’s a matter of supporting and encouraging the student who fears there’s failure in their recognizing, “Um, so I can’t do this. I have to get rid of a class,” she says, “and I’d say, ‘That’s fine, good for you.’ This is success. This is you knowing how to take care of yourself.”

• Pay attention. If a student is afraid of what they see as failing to meet demands that are too much for them, they have to think of a way out. This looks different for everyone, says Dean Buccello. “They may be avoiding a friend or their homework’s not consistent,” she says. “And if it’s happening it doesn’t happen all at once or all in one place. It’s happening in the dorms, in the classroom, at lunch.” This is the time for “more eyes on them, letting them know they have a deep network of support.”