Program Descriptions

This Guidance Department initiative will reimagine how BHS prepares students for life after graduation. They will develop a yearlong guidance curriculum in which students will participate in regular small-group seminars during their junior and senior years, ensuring every student receives the kind of high-quality, consistent, personalized support that is currently only available through expensive private counseling services. The program aims to help students better understand themselves, explore a wider range of post-secondary pathways, and make informed decisions about their future. By focusing on individual strengths, aspirations, and goals, the initiative seeks to reduce stress, improve outcomes, and help every student identify a meaningful and well-suited next step — whether that path leads to higher education, career training, service, employment, or other opportunities. If successful, this work has the potential to give every BHS student a better shot at a future that brings success and fulfillment.

This two-block Social Studies and English elective explores the structure and impact of the U.S. criminal justice system, focusing on key cases like O.J. Simpson and Charles Stuart. Students analyze themes through case law, journalism, fiction, and film, and participate in on-site learning opportunities — such as the Citizens Police Academy — that offer real-world experiences and insight into the criminal justice system. Final projects include a mock trial and either a screenplay or research paper. The course is co-taught in two sections that periodically meet for joint instruction.

As AI tools become more widely used in educational spaces, humanities teachers face unique challenges and opportunities. In English teacher Evan Mousseau’s time as an Innovation Fellow, he explored three interconnected strands of this work: supporting teachers in leveraging AI tools to enhance their instructional practice, equipping students with the skills to use AI responsibly and ethically, and preserving the uniquely human aspects of the humanities. The project created a sustainable framework for AI literacy by researching, developing, and providing resources and professional development for teachers, creating curriculum materials that promote clarity of purpose when using (and not using) AI, and fostering a culture at BHS in which technology supports, rather than replaces, human thinking and connection.

Heritage speakers have acquired a language, not through formal education, but through informal exposure at home. Because traditional Spanish classes are designed for second language acquisition, heritage speakers are not well served by these courses. This two-course pathway is tailored to the needs and proficiencies of heritage Spanish speakers, by recognizing their linguistic assets and affirming their identities. Each course has a strong interdisciplinary connection between literacy in Spanish and English. The goals of the pathway are to foster community, identity, and pride in learners’ heritage while also providing a faster pace of progress toward AP Spanish and other advanced Spanish courses.

Names of schools and plaques around town are examples of how the past is never far from the present if we are able to look closer and more clearly to observe it. In Social Studies teacher Mark Wheeler’s time as an Innovation Fellow, he identified opportunities in 9th-12th grade social studies courses where students could study the public memory around them and create their own versions of it to share with the community. Similar to the successful research paper program, the goal was to formalize a reading, research, and creating process that could be infused in different ways in different courses — all with the common theme of encouraging students to think more deeply about what “history” is, how it is constructed, and how we choose to remember and convey particular events.

The QSP seeks to strengthen LGBTQ community and foster allyship across BHS. The curricular backbone of the QSP are Queer Advisory and Integrated Wellness. Queer Advisory connects LGBTQ students with peers and staff members and helps students access school-wide programming and support. Integrated Wellness is a health and wellness course for grades 10–12 focused on topics such as mental health, relationships, and identity within the LGBTQ community. In addition, the QSP supports: (a) clubs and drop-in spaces, including the Queer Student Union (QSU), Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA), Queer Action Club (QAC), and Queer Students of Color Lunch (QPOC Lunch); (b) social activities, including a fall overnight retreat, monthly social events, and the Brookline Pride parade; and (c) school-wide offerings, including the LGBTQ Day of Dialogue and the OUTstanding Speaker Series.

The Social Justice Leadership program was conceived in 2007 with support from the Fund. School Within a School English teacher Keira Flynn-Carson took the lead on a reimagining of the program. She integrated her work from the prior year as the Fund’s Innovation Fellow, during which she explored ethics as a critical force in driving change. The reimagined program involves academic study (Psychology, Ethics, History, Sociology) as it relates to social justice topics and movements and prepare students to take action through internships and school/community improvement projects — all guided by the ethics of care.

Led by the Fund’s Faculty Liaison, Britt Stevens, this workshop involved faculty from various departments coming together to discuss beginnings and endings at BHS. Beginnings focused on the acculturation of 9th graders into the high school community, and the endings focused on preparing seniors for life beyond BHS. The summit commenced with a design sprint, generating ideas with the hope of sparking future program pitches to the Fund.

This data science course, within the Math Department, uses problems related to a variety of social justice topics to help students learn the skills necessary to analyze data, understand sampling, distinguish correlation from causation, recognize bias, and use probability and modeling to create and support data-based arguments. Topics include social justice issues related to racism, healthcare inequities, political underrepresentation, and gun violence. Students learn how to use spreadsheets, coding (python or R), and data analysis technology to aid them in their research.

In 2002, the Fund seeded BHS Tutorial to support students needing individual, content-based tutoring in academic subjects. With student social-emotional needs rising dramatically since that time, particularly in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, BHS faculty designed and implemented a social-emotional learning section within the existing Tutorial structure. SEL-T helps students with social-emotional challenges learn to identify stressors, and develop coping and self-regulation strategies to support academic and social success at school. From work, more faculty have been trained in SEL pedagogy and how to integrate SEL into courses across the curriculum.

Advisory/Hub, supported by a Fund grant in 2019, has as its principal goal community building among students and a faculty advisor in a non-evaluative setting. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Advisory/Hub became an important source of support for isolated students and an opportunity for teachers to reach out and build connections with students. This grant extension allowed faculty to train new faculty to be advisors and expand the program into a four-year experience for BHS students.

The Fund supported School Within a School English teacher Keira Flynn-Carson as she explored ethics as a critical force in driving change. She explored ethics primarily in the area of sex and consent education, but also in a wide array of human relationship contexts. She developed curriculum, structures, and partnerships that ultimately led to the reimagining of the Social Justice Leadership Program. Her efforts also supported the work of the SHARP Warriors, which are a student group leading BHS efforts to prevent and respond to incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault, and working to create a safer, more supportive school and community culture.

Rethinking the BHS Restaurant focused on designing opportunities for students to take the lead in running its business operations in meaningful and creative ways. Faculty were excited by the multifaceted opportunities for innovation utilizing the restaurant as a lab for interdisciplinary learning with a social impact lens. The restaurant is now a place where English Language Learners introduce dishes from their home cultures as special menu items; where World Language teachers and students work with the culinary program to design “take-over” menus for cultural observations and holidays; and where students and clubs interested in social/food justice or environmental action clubs team with the culinary program to understand and improve how to sustainably run the restaurant as a business. Rethinking the Restaurant opened up outstanding experiential learning opportunities for students not only in the restaurant itself, but also for a diverse range of students in clubs, courses, and throughout the campus.

This course is an interdisciplinary elective for seniors with instruction from both the scientific and historical perspectives. Students engage in a series of projects in which they analyze real world policy options related to climate change, and then research and posit definable and effective solutions. The goal is that students engage in advocacy campaigns designed to shape perceptions on climate change and encourage personal mitigation strategies.

This interdepartmental grant was a collaborative effort from the departments of Math, Science and Career and Technical Education to offer coding experiences to all BHS students by embedding computer science (coding) curriculum into general math and science courses so that every student graduates with a basic understanding of how to code through hands-on coding practice. The goals were to effectively prepare all students who wish to pursue career opportunities in the computer science field; to provide all students with coding knowledge and problem solving experiences that are applicable to a wide variety of career paths; and to address systemic inequities that create roadblocks for students of color and young women to enter computer science fields.

Reacting with urgency to the unprecedented change in the educational environment due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the Fund spearheaded an effort to offer new grant funding for targeted faculty summer workshops outside of our annual budget and typical grant evaluation process. Funding these workshops provided more than 30 educators from 7 departments the opportunity to collaborate simultaneously to address academic skill gaps, assess remote learning, share best practices, and build community for students for the 2020-21 school year.

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The original Advisory program was supported by the Fund at its inception in 2008. Faculty reimagined that program for a new generation of students as Advisory/Hub, with the redesign emphasizing the goal of forming community among students, while offering space in the day separate from the normal academic routine. Beginning with the Class of 2023, this Fund program introduced a completely new structuring of Advisory time through the Hub program. Hub implements the Public Schools of Brookline’s embrace of restorative justice practices, putting student voice at the center, and prioritizing social-emotional growth and connection. In the upper grades, Advisory was expanded to offer students more self-direction and choice along with more regular opportunities to connect with their Advisor and with each other.

This wholesale redesign of the existing course intentionally and sequentially helps students build the scientific skills needed to understand the world and the engineering and entrepreneurial skills to design solutions to today’s problems. This curriculum shifted the classroom away from traditional lectures and toward a model where science is something students do, rather than just something they hear about. By working in teams to investigate physical systems and build their own mathematical models, students are challenged to function like scientists and engineers in a real-world setting. The course was designed to make physics more inclusive and accessible, focusing on collaborative problem-solving and the technical skills required for modern STEM fields.

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In this team-taught course, a production house was created where students not only learned and used technical skills, but also learned about business communication, conduct and management. A fully-functioning, student-run business was developed, where members of the community made requests for promotional materials, or products for their personal or commercial use.

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The Fund supported Social Studies teacher Roger Grande as he worked on building a learning culture related to climate sustainability at BHS. He sought to foster a culture of learning and sustainability among all students to give them the leadership skills and tools needed to tackle issues related to climate change. Roger’s aim was to make sustainability part of the common culture and expectations throughout BHS.

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A school-wide initiative that served as a vehicle for students to learn about self-identity; building empathy; promoting awareness regarding power and privilege; inspiring action; and embedding course-specific curriculum. The design placed an emphasis on the “Big 8” social identities (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, religion/spirituality, nationality, and socio-economic status). The program crafted an inclusive curriculum, cultivating student and faculty understanding, and provided a pedagogical structure responsive to the needs of the BHS community.

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Latin teacher Eli Williams noticed that colleagues were developing unique expertise in their teaching craft, but there was limited sharing of that knowledge, let alone formalizing of best practices. In addition, teachers were often reluctant to ask for help in the absence of clearly defined resources due to respect for their colleagues’ time. As an Innovation Fellow with the Fund, Eli’s main goals were to document other teacher’s methods, build a directory of internal experts, and then share those best practices across BHS. He collected over 60 video observations of different lessons of BHS educators. One best practice he learned related to the first 3-5 minutes of class as a basis for connecting with students and setting everyone up for success. He adopted that practice in his own classroom and shared that information across BHS. Eli’s overall impact focused on fostering a culture of continuous improvement at BHS, in which knowing the strengths of other educators fostered “permission to ask” for strategies and best practices for reaching and supporting kids.

As part of the celebration of the Fund’s 20th anniversary, this one-day program brought Ted Dintersmith together with faculty, students, administrators, and Public Schools of Brookline district leadership in a series of roundtable discussions. Participants were challenged to exchange ideas about what academic innovation means now and what it might look like in the future, both in Brookline and beyond. The day culminated in a conversation held in the BHS Auditorium, free and open to the public, and moderated by WBUR anchor Meghna Chakrabarti.

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This class provides opportunities for students to move beyond 2-D drafting and into the creation of real, three dimensional products. The student-centered, multidisciplinary curriculum integrates principles of engineering and aesthetics and utilizes a makerspace — a collaborative setting where students share their various skills and perspectives around conceptualizing, designing, testing, refining, and actualizing their products. Alongside the Engineering by Design course supported by the Fund in 2006, the addition of this course provides for a cohesive Engineering pathway at BHS.

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This sophomore elective explores the complexities of race within our national, local, and high school communities. Students meet in a seminar-style class designed to foster their capacity to speak effectively about their own identities and to listen carefully and thoughtfully as others reflect on and speak about theirs. The class requires students to articulate their own experiences, to learn from their classmates’ experiences, and to develop a greater understanding across racial identification lines. Students engage in experiential learning activities and group discussions and are challenged to think of ways to share their new understandings with the greater community.

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In this interdisciplinary Social Studies/Visual Arts course, students explore how history is recorded in written form, and they engage with one of the most powerful ways in which history is created and disseminated — documentary film. Students engage in developing critical thinking skills as collaborative learners from multiple disciplines, perspectives, and understandings. Through the lens of presenting historical information in film, the students address issues of academic research, writing, media literacy, and perspective. Decision-making and ethics are a central theme of the intersection of the written and filmed presentation of historical events. Final projects are screened at a BHS Film Festival.

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After hearing of a largely untapped interest in fashion at BHS, English teacher Elon Fischer decided to use his time as an Innovation Fellow with the Fund to help provide more opportunities at BHS that support students’ creativity. Fischer worked together with a couple of motivated students and the owner of House of Colors, an arts studio on Washington Street in Brookline, to form a fashion design club and explore the creation of an elective course. He also helped the club put on displays of the students’ fashion design pieces outside the MLK room.

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EPIC is a year-long course that offers BHS seniors a new way of taking charge of their learning by independently pursuing, in a supportive environment, topics they are passionate about. With the support and guidance of BHS teachers, as well as experts and mentors outside of the school, students design, execute and present their own personal passion projects. Through reading and research, engagement with experts in the field, experimentation, revision, and collaboration, students develop a project of their own design and immerse themselves in the process of creation.

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Through partnerships with Mindful Schools and with Mass General Hospital’s Benson-Henry Institute, this initiative brought formal training in mindfulness and stress-response relaxation methods to BHS faculty, students, and parents. These practices were integrated into the community’s ways of teaching, learning, and collaborating. Program goals included: (1) to help BHS faculty and students develop strategies for identifying and managing stress and building resiliency; (2) to educate the school community on the impacts of stress, techniques for managing it, and implementing mindfulness —healthy habits of mind — as an approach to teaching and learning; and (3) to develop practical skills in the BHS community for healthy stress responses that will help students find the “sweet spot” of stress that nourishes intellectual and emotional resilience and growth. This program began in 2015, ran for three years as granted, and then received a fourth (single) year of funding in 2018 to develop and execute an integration plan in the BHS curriculum.

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Social Studies teacher Sam Dickerman.

This one year grant provided time for a teacher team to research and establish the local relationships that would contribute to a successful proposal for the Mindfulness Initiative the following year.

This one year grant provided time for a teacher team to lay the groundwork for an alternative senior year curriculum allowing seniors the chance to design, drive, and direct their own capstone project. The result of grant was a successful proposal for the current EPIC program.

Global Leadership is a successful Fund course that was launched in 2010. This one-year grant faculty to conduct curriculum review during its first year after incorporation into the BHS budget.

Held in in July 2014, this two-day workshop gave teachers the time and space to reflect on the possibilities of innovation in the classroom and explore their best and new ideas.

In this interdisciplinary course, students build scientific knowledge about their immediate environment through observational drawing and field research. Using the principles of visual design and scientific investigation, students communicate their scientific knowledge to others through visually powerful images and forms.

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This program spurred collaborative faculty inquiry and research into innovative educational practices. The program had one year of seed funding from the Fund in partnership with other organizations, and then continued to be partially funded by others.

The goal of the BHS Content Reading Initiative (CRI) was to provide intensive professional development to teachers so that they, in turn, become more effective at teaching the gateway skills of content literacy. The integration of literacy instruction into all disciplines’ instruction ensures that every student who graduates from BHS can read and write independently in all subjects. This was a four-year program designed to permeate the BHS culture during its funding period.

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This course is a full year senior elective math course for students interested in a new look at math. It exposes students to opportunities to use math after high school, both at the university level and in future career endeavors. By year end, students demonstrate a fuller appreciation and awareness of mathematics, and its relevance in today’s society, through discussion, reflection, and experience.

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Offered through the BHS the World Languages Department, this course trains students to become Spanish/English medical interpreters and includes shadowing opportunities at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and at Beth Israel Hospital. Credit earned through World Language or Career and Tech Ed.

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Held in July 2011, this two-day summit invited teachers to share ideas around academic innovation, and how they might be implemented at BHS. Teachers imagined how they could address issues around teaching that interest them.

This initiative included the establishment of a student-staffed writing center where BHS seniors are trained to be compassionate and effective coaches for other students who are less confident writers.

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This year-long course teaches students important theories and skills of effective leadership in a global context and guides students in their efforts to research, plan, and acquire resources for applied service learning experiences. The class requires students to learn from texts, scholarly articles, and case studies about theories of global leadership.

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This project draws students who have been under-represented in BHS’s arts program into more active participation in expressive art activities. Students in programs like Winthrop House, ACE (Alternative Choices in Education) and CBC (Community Based Classroom) often miss out on BHS arts offerings due to geographic isolation from the main campus or extreme self-consciousness within larger classes of their peers. The Arts Infusion Lab provides these students with a variety of arts-oriented opportunities tailored for delivery within their existing specialized programs.

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The Political Literacy program was a speaker series comprised primarily of Boston area political leaders and thinkers for both school-based and community-wide events. The BHS Social Studies Department coordinated their ’08 election curriculum with the speaker series.

Through the vehicle of a consistent home room across a student’s four year experience, Advisory creates a way for every student to learn more about BHS and his/her role in the community; to explore diversity within a group of peers; to connect with peer leaders at the High School; and to reflect on their academic and social goals as they journey through high school.

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This program aimed to help families fully engage in their children’s education through a student, teacher-mentor, and family community that supported underachieving students and worked towards narrowing the achievement gap. Learning from this program was compiled and shared with BHS Guidance Department.

This program seeks to distinguish between community service and social justice, emphasizing collective rather than individual responses to injustice, and transformative rather than temporary relief from social problems. Social Justice Leadership aims to fill a void, creating a novel program offering students an experience that is student-defined and action-oriented.

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This course was developed by teachers from all areas of the BHS Science Department in collaboration with the Tufts University School of Engineering. Together, they created a curriculum challenging students to identify problems, design, build, and test their solutions.

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This program addresses the issue of minority student isolation that impedes academic performance. AALSP has nurtured a body of academically excellent African-American and Latino students who have become role models in the BHS community, and it has greatly raised the bar for academic and personal achievement among African-American and Latino BHS students. Students in all four grades, each with a GPA of 2.7 or higher, participate in the program and have become part of a culture of achievement.

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Under the direction of Prof. Ronald Ferguson of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, this initiative included BHS as one of twelve public high schools examining how teacher practices and student engagement could improve learning outcomes.

In collaboration with their Tutorial teachers, students identify specific focus areas for improving academic performance and receive individual content-based tutoring. Class time is divided between personalized consultation in content areas and independent practice (where the student implements recommended strategies).

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This program enabled the creation of BHS teacher websites, providing hardware, teacher training, and paid opportunities for technology students to assist teachers in the technical aspects of maintaining their websites.

This interdisciplinary course — intersecting English and Social Studies — was offered to BHS seniors. Its curriculum included units on social identity and membership, eugenics, genocide, the politics of power and social activism, and the issues and challenges of education. GCGS students studied history, literature, art, and public policy in order to understand controversial issues and society’s responses. This course was a successful elective through three iterations of Program Leaders. Good Citizen’s curriculum supported the development of subsequent Fund courses (Social Justice, Global Leadership), and the course was eventually phased out of the BHS course offerings. The program was integrated and ran through school year 2008/2009.

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This program was designed to address the major challenge of high turnover among new teachers. National research shows that 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years of signing their first contract. TMT addresses this major challenge through a comprehensive induction and mentoring program for new staff.

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