These are the questions leaders at Hackley School (NY) decided to explore in a deep and comprehensive way. We were about to commit to a major endeavor in health education occasioned, in part, by a gift from a generous donor, and we wanted to do it right. We knew the topic was complex. We knew we wanted a holistic approach grounded in evidence. And we knew we would anchor new programs in the mission and culture of our school. So we began by asking questions. A lot of them.
Six years ago, we committed to defining how Hackley would think about health and wellness, and in that time, our school has learned more about this topic in today’s environment than we could have imagined—and also about our students, our community, and the importance of setting up enduring structures to ensure we are asking the right questions.
Getting Started
During former headmaster Walter C. Johnson’s 21-year tenure, he returned time and again to the idea that moral development is at the center of the educational enterprise. Johnson announced Hackley’s new initiative in 2013 to the school community by writing that “health education, broadly conceived, should teach us how to lead balanced, successful lives, in terms not only of exercise, nutrition and stress management, but through fulfilling work and the love of friends and family.” The first step was to set up structures to support the work, and to review the way we asked questions.Together with Johnson, the board of trustees convened the ad-hoc health and wellness committee, for which I served as administrative co-chair, that would meet for the next two years. To ensure a broad, deep scope of inquiry, nine members, including faculty members, physicians, health professionals, and parents, were charged with defining health and wellness for the school, making recommendations for focus areas and leading the eventual construction of a new center for health and wellness. Maintaining mission consistency throughout the process was a top priority.
We drew upon our school’s founding values, rooted in concern for student well-being. Theodore Chickering Williams, Hackley’s founding headmaster, wrote in 1904, “That is what I have tried for, to make a place where it should be ‘easy to be good.’” In reflecting on the school’s values, we realized our initiative rested on a reinterpretation of Chickering’s terms: What does “good” mean in the context of health and wellness in the 21st century, and what would most help students choose to live wisely and well? These became the essential questions that have guided our school’s work.
At the same time, the health and wellness committee led a faculty team in designing a daylong professional development symposium on health and wellness for faculty, staff, and trustees. Thought leaders from Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and The Mind and Life Institute led interactive workshops about nutrition, positive psychology, and the science behind mindfulness. We conducted design thinking-inspired sessions with the faculty to test-drive our questions, gather input, and further refine our approach.
Five areas for inquiry focus emerged:
- How to help students achieve life balance and manage stress?
- How to ensure inclusion and social-emotional wellness?
- How to create habits of physical fitness and nutrition?
- How to foster cognitive and mental health?
- How to help students develop meaningful bonds in ethical relation with their peers and teachers?
Building Foundations
With these focus questions in place, we wanted to make sure we could support the work ahead. The excitement from the symposium generated faculty-led ad-hoc steering committees targeting different dimensions of wellness. This process distributed the leadership, enhanced buy-in, and led to better decision-making. We created a standing health and wellness committee, which included stakeholders in athletics, physical education, health education, student psychological services, and our school nurse.We also realized that for students to live healthy, balanced lives, those who support them must have the opportunity to do so as well. We began an employee wellness program, including free classes such as yoga, healthy cooking, and personal fitness for employees and their spouses and partners.
Next, we focused on data collection. We worked with the Independent School Health Check to survey our ninth- and 11th-grade students. Then, taking what we learned and using our focus questions, we followed up by crafting homegrown surveys for students in grades 7–12. Miguel G. Marshall, former interim director of the Independent School Health Association, helped audit our existing health education curriculum, food and nutrition practices, and wellness programming, as well as our community awareness of these issues.
The audit clarified a great deal for us. We were surprised to find that we were doing more programming around the school than we thought, though in pieces rather than systematically. Among the many valuable recommendations from the audit, a few stood out: developing a comprehensive K–12 health curriculum that connected those pieces and aligned with current best practices; articulating the role of food, food literacy, and nutrition as part of Hackley’s school health mission; reviewing policies, education and procedures around reporting sexual assault, abuse, and harassment; creating a platform for medical services, psychological services, physical education, and athletics to collaborate on curricular and other matters; and increasing the opportunities for parent education partnerships to flourish. With the momentum the audit helped us attain, we processed and interpreted the data as we received it, and developed a five dimensional approach that we soon came to adopt as Hackley’s definition of wellness: physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual.
We enhanced our professional development programming, strategically sending faculty to off-campus opportunities and bringing in experts for schoolwide in-service days. Karen Reivich of the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center and Mayme Hostetter of The Relay School of Graduate Education hosted trainings at Hackley. We reached out to peer institutions to learn from their advances in well-being programming, and at the 2015 NAIS Annual Conference, I presented Hackley’s initial work, alongside Marshall and faculty at Philips Academy (MA), Saint Philip’s Episcopal School (FL), and Dana Hall School (MA), on a panel called “The Future of Health and Well-Being: Multidisciplinary Strategies for School Communities.”
Finally, following the board ad-hoc committee’s recommendation, Hackley created a new position. To do so, we asked: What role would best serve our students given the work of the past few years, and how should the data we have collected inform the role? This question led to a number of insights:
- inclusion—and all it encompasses—is integral to wellness;
- expertise in health curriculum is as important as knowing how to infuse that curriculum across different disciplines;
- addressing fundamental issues such as stress management, preventative substance use, sexual development and healthy relationships will always be crucial; and
- having a clear sense of the issues that await our students in college life is paramount.
Where We Are Now
Now that our questions have enabled us to define what health education should look like at Hackley, what successes have we had? A number of promising developments encourage us to think we are on the right track.In January 2018, we opened the Johnson Center for Health and Wellness, Hackley’s state-of-the-art facility named in honor of Johnson. We welcomed students and faculty back from winter break with a daylong “Wellness Festival” that explored each of the five dimensions we had settled on in our definition of wellness. The festival featured a local produce market, experiential workshops including circus arts, dance, martial arts instruction, healthy cooking, yoga, meditation, cognitive puzzle design, and a communitywide art project that now greets the center’s visitors. The day was a genuine celebration of student health, wellness, and well-being. Our careful framing had paid off—our community strengthened its shared understanding of the five dimensions through participation in the day’s activities while simultaneously relishing the symbolic importance of opening the Johnson Center in such a celebratory way.
Through our continued questioning with employees, we’ve been able to expand the employee wellness programs to include swimming, CrossFit, ceramics, knitting, nutrition sessions, and wilderness walks. As one faculty member put it, “this is the first time I have exercised consistently in my life. I feel physically better, enjoy the camaraderie with my colleagues, and I love knowing I am modelling wellness for my students.” We are now pursuing a comprehensive portal-based employee health and wellness assistance program to encourage more participation.
As part of our initiative, we created the lower school teaching garden, and it is integrated into our curriculum so that every student now experiences the joy of digging in the dirt, along with lessons in nutrition and sustainability, reinforced through exercises in literacy and math. And they are proud to eat vegetables they have harvested themselves. Marshall’s health and wellness assessment helped strengthen our partnership with our food service provider, FLIK; members of the health and wellness committee now meet with the FLIK team regularly to review menus, reflect on progress, and plan. The chef even features a different garden-grown vegetable each month, prepared three ways for students to sample and vote on.
Many teachers across the divisions have integrated new tools and techniques into their classrooms. English department chair Richard Robinson uses a traditional breathing-based meditation method to open each class. The upper and middle schools have instituted carefully placed “homework-free” weekends to help reduce student stress. Upper, middle, and lower divisions integrate more outside time for both learning and exercise in Hackley’s 200-acre forest. Advisory programming and upper school chapel talks have taken on a more overt role in building social and emotional wellness.
We have come to understand that “belonging” is at the center of health and wellness. Pabst is mindful that the more traditional elements of health education, such as substance avoidance, hygiene, and nutrition, cannot be detached from the social and emotional aspects of wellness. “As we talk about health and social well-being, we work on what it means to ‘belong,’ and to help other people belong,” she says.
This focus redefines health education as something active and constructive, with a curriculum that begins with character education in lower school, works through bystander training that builds healthy relationship and inclusivity in middle school, and builds to conversations about substance prevention, mental health, and sexual health and consent in upper school. Pabst partners with student advisory groups and seeks moments of intersection with other curricula. For example, a ninth-grade English class discussion of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings provided the opportunity for Pabst to engage students as a classroom guest teacher to reach a deeper understanding of sexual assault and consent.
Our program recognizes the importance of teaching students that kindness, courage, and integrity matter, and that a sense of right and wrong is deeply connected to their own well-being and that of others. Aspiring to maintain the spirit of a place where it is “easy to be good,” our approach connects students first with themselves, then with each other, and then with the world beyond campus.
Looking Ahead
We are still asking questions. Last year we developed what a “Portrait of a Graduate” looks like at Hackley. It reflects, in part, six years’ worth of conversations regarding health, wellness, and well-being. Echoing our mission statement, Hackley’s portrait begins with “Habits of Character,” moves through “Habits of Scholarship,” and ends with “Habits of Accomplishment.” The final phrase of the portrait represents so much of what our questions have pursued—to “reinforce the immeasurable value of a life marked by friendship, balance, and joy.” The portrait, in turn, informed Hackley’s Strategic Plan, Redefining Excellence: Learning Beyond Boundaries (2018). The plan’s four strategies conclude with: “Nurture a culture of wellness. Establish wellness—both at the student and institutional levels— as cornerstones of a healthy learning environment and enduring school community.” Our questions have become school identity, woven into the fabric of who we are and what we aspire to become.While we still have much to learn, we relish the thought that at Hackley the true goal of health, wellness, and well-being resonates with a timeless definition of wisdom— the ability to discern how to live wisely and well. What greater gift can we bestow upon our students?