Chapel Hill Chauncy Hall School

At CH-CH, we know that every learner enters the classroom with a unique set of intellectual, personal, and academic strengths. Classes at CH-CH stimulate and challenge students by tapping into their different “intelligences” as defined and inspired by Dr. Howard Gardner of Harvard University, who developed the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Dr. Gardner proposes that there are nine “intelligences” that schools need to stimulate and support. At CH-CH, teachers design lessons that address the range of these intelligences, thus giving student multiple avenues into the essential skills and understandings in each course.

We create multiple paths to mastery of the skills and content provided, ensuring that all students have the opportunity to engage with the material in a meaningful and deep way. Differentiated instruction is an approach to teaching that recognizes two basic facts: all students are capable of high achievement and all students come to each class with a varied set of strengths and challenges. In order to ensure achievement of essential skills and understandings, CH-CH teachers come to know their students well and provide them with a variety of entry points and academic strategies that allow them to leverage their individual strengths in the classroom. Our highly trained faculty, over 70% of whom possess advanced degrees, engage in thousands of hours of professional development annually in order to develop their content area knowledge and their pedagogical “toolbox” in order to best help CH-CH students achieve academic success and prepare themselves for college.

In our intentionally small classrooms, with an average class size of just over ten, teachers engage students’ strengths, create multiple avenues to academic success, and help students grow in their self-advocacy and self-confidence. All this work leads into a personalized college counseling process where students find, apply to and attend colleges that fit the student they have become and the person they want to be.

Our students come from a wide range of academic backgrounds and choose CH-CH because they know our intimate community will embrace who they are and challenge them to grow into what they can become. Once here, students find a community that is supportive, academically challenging, and focused on successful preparation for college and beyond.

In the belief that every part of the students’ lives offers lessons and opportunities for personal development, Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall provides many challenging programs in the classroom and beyond. The academic program is designed to support and challenge each student and to acknowledge that students learn in a variety of ways. The curriculum also incorporates programming in areas such as afternoon activities, athletics, physical fitness, health education, community service, student presentations, residential life, student clubs and organizations, and leadership training opportunities.

The underlying goals of the curriculum are to provide students with the opportunity to develop self-confidence as learners and to achieve a greater degree of independence and maturity in thinking, making decisions, and taking actions. All students at Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall are expected to pursue a program of study appropriate to their abilities, skills, and interests that will prepare them for further study after graduation.

SAS is taken as a scheduled class which meets during the academic day, three times a week as part of a student’s normal schedule. Each class includes group discussion of study strategies and skills, such as note taking, textbook reading, test preparation, computer literacy, and problem solving, with ample time reserved for students to work on their individual class assignments. With a student-teacher ratio never greater than 4:1, SAS learning specialists are able to address individual student needs in a personal and friendly setting.