About Stuart Hall School

Stuart Hall School is a co-educational day and boarding school for grades 6–12 in historic Staunton, Virginia, offering a rigorous liberal arts and Mastery Learning education that emphasizes deep understanding, real-world application, and personal growth. Its diverse, inclusive community fosters leadership, creativity, athletics, and the arts, preparing students for engaged lives and success in universities worldwide within a close-knit campus rooted in nearly two centuries of tradition.

Position Overview

Students learn best when they connect their classrooms to their community, increasing engagement, learning, and community impact. The Institute for Engagement and Impact is rooted in this belief, combining Stuart Hall’s educational approach with its location in a powerful way.

The inaugural Director of the Institute will have the privilege of developing the position and focus of the institute in collaboration with the school's senior leadership team. It is intended to consolidate existing activities, align with a pedagogical shift toward project-based learning, and leverage the school's unique location.

The director, who will have budgetary control and teach one or two classes (preferably in upper school math or science), will primarily focus on taking ownership of the afternoon co-curricular program and enhancing existing place-based and Expedition Day experiences by working with faculty and establishing community relationships.

Key Responsibilities

The Institute is led by a Director who is charged with pursuing the Institute’s purpose by doing three things:

• Leading programs that empower students to take ownership of their learning as they apply the skills they’ve mastered in their core courses to real-world situations, using the pillars of place-based education as the guiding principles for those programs.
• Creating opportunities for students to discover, in the words of Frederick Buechner, where their “deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”
• Supporting faculty and staff in facilitating learning that has a visible or measurable impact on students and the community.

The initial priorities for the director will be to focus on three existing programs and revise them to align with the purpose of The Institute:

• The afternoon co-curricular program
• Expedition Days, which are a series of day-long, place-based learning experiences for students 
• The academic program, working with faculty to understand their course goals and approach, their familiarity with place-based education, and their needs for assistance and support to incorporate or expand existing place-based education principles in their classes

The School has defined these priorities for the first two to three years of the director’s work. The director will collaborate with school leadership to define goals and action items for pursuing these priorities.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The successful candidate will be an entrepreneurial thinker and creative problem solver who will relish the opportunity to create something new within the Institute and build it into a well-defined and established part of the Stuart Hall School community.

The ideal candidate will:

• Have experience managing and leading people.
• Understand programming, specifically afternoon programs.
• Pay attention to detail.
• Possess enthusiasm for outside of class school life and activities.
• Be a relationship builder.
• Be tech savvy and have experience with Google School and Google Chat.
• Be familiar with the principles of mastery learning and/or standards based assessment.
• Have experience with implementing place-based education principles.
• Be empathetic.
• Be comfortable "flying the plane while building it".

Opportunity Statement: https://doc.storydoc.com/ZRh5TT