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.

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. This fall, Dr. Gilligan and her team will return to Hewitt for a second round of student interviews. She will also support our faculty as they incorporate her findings into their teaching practice. 

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). Her work gave us a more in-depth look at our own data and a better understanding of the experiences of Black students at Hewitt. 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.

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.