Sanford Shapiro looks at The Eagle Hill School
Tuesday, January 17th, 2006
Sanford Shapiro looks at The Eagle Hill School
© 2006 Sanford Shapiro
The Eagle Hill School, founded in 1975, currently serves 204 students who struggle with language-based learning disabilities. Though many of their students display a dyslexic learning profile, some have more diffuse language processing weaknesses. Set in a beautiful wooded area of Old Greenwich, this school works with students from primary through eighth grade and has a five-day boarding program in addition to their day school.
The leadership of this school has been working since its inception to provide strong research-based instruction well before that phrase became a buzzword. When I asked Eagle Hill’s long-time assistant head of school Tom Cone (who started as a teacher there in 1975) what he was most proud of (regarding the school’s growth) he indicated that it was the school’s ability to stay current with up-to-date research developments while keeping a strong school tradition. Rather than employ one singular instructional approach, Eagle Hill faculty incorporate a variety of evidence-based approaches. While observing a language skills class for a group of 6 middle school-aged students, I watched an effective teacher use multi sensory instruction and linguistic strategies to work her students through their lesson. It seemed to me that I watched three important characteristics of good teaching, a thorough command of the information (and well-planned), teaching kids to be meta-cognitive (making the process of how one thinks through a problem/task evident and part of the lesson) and a personable energetic connection to each student by the teacher. I don’t believe the teacher in question was a particularly long-seasoned veteran and was a pretty fair example of many of the faculty and its faculty training.
Each of the students at Eagle Hill has, as the basis of reading and writing remediation, a skill-based tutorial class as well as an additional three language arts classes that are more application and literature-based. Students take the usual array of content classes here and can access speech and language therapy and some adaptive motor training when needed.
Eagle Hill, Greenwich has developed an approach to transition that focuses on judiciously removing some of the scaffolds of support that exists earlier in a child’s program. When a student enters their transition program (back-towards-a traditional school), class size increases and there is more reliance on textbooks and mainstream grade expectations.
What struck me about Eagle Hill is its ability to feel warm, supportive and intimate, while delivering up to date instruction with ample use of technology. The newer academic building has quite a few smart boards being utilized for instruction and it wasn’t just cool looking hardware, teachers were actively engaged in training for usage.
Finally, like a few other schools that have reached a high level of competency, Eagle Hill has been developing what they call their Learning Center. Its mission is to provide education and outreach to the wider community of kids and parents who may not need or be able to access their full time school.
Related at this site: The Eagle Hill School