Hewitt News

The third commitment of The Hewitt School’s strategic vision is to redefine women’s leadership by convening student, academic, and industry leaders to challenge, transcend, and transform conventional assumptions about gender, power, and leadership in our society. Read on to learn about how this commitment lives in the everyday experiences of our students and what students and families can look forward to next at Hewitt.

We established The Center for Gender and Ethical Leadership in Society to bridge the gap between girls’ education and women’s leadership in the workforce and society. At Hewitt, students participate in, contribute to, and benefit from the most current research on how girls and women learn and lead. Our Center has formed partnerships with nearly a dozen renowned scholars and researchers, including Dr. Carol Gilligan (New York University), Dr. Frances Rust (University of Pennsylvania), and Dr. Terri Watson (City University of New York). Each of these scholars is partnering with the School to ensure that Hewitt faculty build classroom environments that foster ethical leadership development for girls and young women. The Center has also partnered with Mine the Gap to create a K-12 girls’ leadership toolkit to help educators understand the biases women face in industry pipelines and how to teach tangible skills that will benefit girls and young women in school and after they leave Hewitt.

Why this innovation matters: Our teachers are using research-backed strategies to bolster every Hewitt girl’s capacity to overcome both systemic and individual barriers to leadership on her college campus, in her career, and in her life.  

We launched the Hewitt Action Research Collaborative to train high school students to work with quantitative and qualitative data to tackle meaningful, real-world challenges. Students play a critical role in creating impactful and sustainable change in their school communities for the benefit of both current and future students. This fall, the team analyzed student survey data and formulated a genuine research question: What defines success at Hewitt? They have just completed interviews with upper school students and are coding the data. At the end of the school year, students will use their findings to make a recommendation to a roundtable of scholars, school leaders, students, and faculty designed to positively impact school culture and student well-being. In years to come, seeing our students’ recommendations in action will be a powerful reminder of how Hewitt empowers young women to lead positive change in their own community. 

Why this innovation matters: Hewitt girls aren’t just answering teachers’ questions; starting with the ninth grade in the fall of 2023, every upper school student will receive graduate-level training in how to design authentic research questions, conduct original research projects, and apply their findings to benefit the community.