Center for Girls' Research and Leadership 

Our 10th, 11th, and 12th graders have the opportunity to engage in Youth Participatory Action Research. As youth action researchers, students tackle real-world challenges that are personally meaningful to them, and play a critical role in creating impactful and sustainable change in their school community for the benefit of both current and future students. Through the Hewitt Action Research Collaborative (HARC), high school students learn how to use both academic literature and qualitative research methods to identify and design a research endeavor. To culminate their yearlong study, students present their findings and recommendations at a roundtable of scholars, school leaders, students, and faculty who consider implementation of their ideas.

HARC is a credit-bearing elective offered to students in grades 10, 11, and 12, whose high school transcripts will reflect this unique and highly distinguished student-led research experience. To prepare for this experience, all Hewitt ninth graders participate in a required research seminar where they learn foundational research skills needed for HARC and Extended Inquiry.

Thanks to our community’s generous support of Hewitt’s Center for Girls' Research and Leadership, we are delighted to launch a new research fellowship program to enhance professional development and promote innovative educational practices for Hewitt’s faculty. Our faculty fellowships encourage teachers to engage in research that aligns with Hewitt’s mission and values, particularly in the areas of curriculum development, pedagogy, and student engagement. 

The Center is thrilled to welcome Upper School English Teacher Miriam Walden and Physical Education Teacher Kat Miller as our inaugural research fellows. Miriam and Kat will spend the 2025-2026 school year engaging with research focused on what is best for girls and disrupting socialized norms in their content areas. Their work will inform their own teaching practices and the design of their courses and will also be shared in professional spaces both at and beyond Hewitt. 

Hewitt has made an important investment in being a community of educators who reflect on their teaching practice and continue to grow and evolve for the everyday benefit of their students. Dr. Frances Rust (University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development) partnered with Hewitt to develop the foundations of this work through deep and reflective conversations examining our own teaching practices. 

Hewitt teachers engage in instructional rounds (a structured opportunity for faculty to continuously improve their practice by observing one another and giving and receiving feedback) and explore and share research-backed pedagogies to ensure that each Hewitt girl is appropriately challenged and engaged in her learning. 

This study revisits Dr. Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking work on girls from 30 years ago, which fundamentally changed how the field of developmental psychology understands girls. In the first phase of the study, Dr. Gilligan and her research team of Naomi Snider and Dr. Tonya Leslie interviewed Hewitt students across lower, middle, and high school to hear what girls’ voices sound like today.

This three year study is aimed at ensuring that Hewitt's programming continues to center the voices and needs of girls and young women and will impact how all educators think about girls’ development. In the next stage of this study, Dr. Gilligan will work with Hewitt teachers to connect her findings to the classroom by identifying and implementing teaching strategies that support girls’ authentic voices. 

With support from a Klingenstein Center Seed Grant, Dr. Lauren Bailes (University of Delaware) completed a quantitative analysis of data from Hewitt’s 2022 YouthTruth survey (a school culture survey). Dr. Bailes and Dr. Cyr also interviewed Black Hewitt students to better understand their day to day experiences at school. Dr. Bailes shared her qualitative and quantitative findings with our faculty and staff to give them key insights on how they can create positive change within and beyond the classroom for Black Hewitt students in our middle and high schools. This work will be published as a book chapter in 2026. 

With her deep expertise working with Black girls in schools and improving their educational experiences, Dr. Terri Watson (City University of New York), met regularly with upper school students in Hewitt’s Black Student Union to explore how their teachers make them feel supported, successful, and loved and provided critical mentorship and support to Black Hewitt students.

Over the course of the 2022-2023 school year, The Hewitt School worked with consulting firm Mine the Gap to create a first-of-its kind K-12 leadership toolkit. Designed for teachers across grades and disciplines, this new leadership toolkit guides Hewitt teachers through exercises to examine their own leadership styles and provides current research on the barriers women face in gaining access to leadership, the unique experiences women bring to leadership roles, and how organizations can support women leaders. 

We continue to train our professional community in how to use the toolkit to incorporate tangible skills into their teaching practices that will help Hewitt girls and young women navigate the leadership pipeline.