Shady Hill School is an independent, co-educational day school in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

. Founded in 1915, Shady Hill serves students in pre-kindergarten (called 'Beginners' by the school) through 8th grade. The school has an enrollment of approximately 500 students.

Current Shady Hill Head of School Mark Stanek became the school's sixth director in 2010. Former Director Bruce Shaw stepped down in June 2010.

History

Shady Hill was founded in 1915 by a group of Cambridge families. The original location of the school was on the "back porch" of a house on Quincy Street in Cambridge. The house was owned by Ernest and Agnes Hocking, two of the founding parents. The school enrollment quickly outgrew the Hocking home, and the Cooperative Open Air School (as it was originally known) moved to the Charles Eliot Norton estate at the corner of Scott and Holden Streets in Cambridge. The school took its current name from this location: Shady Hill Square, before moving to the school's current location on Coolidge Hill in Cambridge.

Campus

The Shady Hill School campus is located in a quiet Cambridge neighborhood and features eleven acres of tree-lined paths, wetlands, and ample grassy areas for play and team sports. There are eighteen buildings on campus, including an art, woodshop, and music center; library; gymnasium; science laboratories; an assembly hall; and a number of child-scaled classroom buildings.

Curriculum

Shady Hill's curriculum stresses the relationships among many areas of learning and use original source materials, rather than textbooks. The school uses a distinctive approach to learning called Central Subject which is the fundamental organizing force behind teaching and learning. Central Subject is a year-long study around which each grade, III - VIII, focuses its work in history, literature, geography, and writing. It is the study of a people, a period of history, an idea or movement. It is a way of organizing subject matter that is flexible, inclusive, frequently changing in its application, yet constant in its commitment to certain approaches to study. Other academic activities—art, music, science, dramatics, math, and athletics — frequently become parts of the Central Subject curriculum.

Athletics

Shady Hill's athletic program includes movement education and physical education, as well as a broad variety of intramural and interscholastic team sports. A new gymnasium that houses three full-sized basketball courts opened in February 2009.

Teacher Training Course

Shady Hill offers a one-year teacher preparation and graduation program in which 16 to 18 apprentice teachers are mentored by certified master teachers in a classroom at Shady Hill. Apprentices have the opportunity through the Teacher Training Course (TTC) to spend the spring semester in local public schools. Many apprentices also participate in a master's program at either Lesley University or Tufts University.

More than 1,300 teachers have graduated from Shady Hill's Teacher Training Course. The TTC has consulted with schools throughout the state, across the country and around the world about the best ways to train teachers.