Exploration. Leadership. Transformation. These are the pillars that global initiatives are built upon at Tower Hill School.
In the global initiatives program at Tower Hill, we work diligently to preserve our existing programmatic efforts and expand our opportunities to meet the needs and interests of our student body, bolstering academic initiatives and reflecting our core values of exploration, leadership and transformation.
Beginning in the Lower School, our focus is on global exploration. Grade levels are attached to different continents for the entire year, where they learn about the history and culture of that specific continent. Students are also introduced to the Spanish language in the Lower School and participate in a number of signature activities, most notably, the passport program and, at the end of the year, a World’s Fair, which highlights what they have learned about their continent throughout the year. All of these programs generate a great deal of teacher engagement and student enthusiasm.
In Middle School, students have the opportunity to become leaders in their division. They can apply for the Global Leaders program, where they lead discussions with their peers on global issues, perform age-appropriate community service and culminate their experiences with a capstone project.
In the seventh and eighth grades, in particular, students have the option for short-term study travel to either Québec or Puerto Rico. This January, almost 100 Middle Schoolers traveled to one of those destinations. Whether they were swimming in a Puerto Rican bioluminescent bay or exploring the 400-year-old city of Old Québec, by all accounts, it was an incredibly successful and enriching experience.
The Upper School builds upon the pillars of exploration and leadership but with a greater focus on providing transformational experiences. To achieve that goal, we offer a number of opportunities. Students and their families can host an international student for a year. This academic year, our school is lucky to be joined by Libertad Vasquez Fernandez, from Spain, who was hosted in the fall by Michael and Kara Vanni, parents of Thomas ’23, Ella ’26 and Charlotte ’27. The Vannis said, “It was a joy sharing our holiday traditions with her and learning about her family and culture. We have made memories that will last a lifetime.”
Host families can come from any division—Lower, Middle or Upper School—or Tower Hill faculty.
Tower Hill has also long offered international travel for our Upper School students. Students can participate in month-long, two-way exchange programs through partnerships with Rungsted Gymnasium in Denmark and St. Catherine’s School in Australia. In recent years, faculty have organized short-term trips to destinations such as Costa Rica, Peru, France, Italy and Spain. We plan to add Taiwan to that list for Mandarin students in 2026. This March, for the first time ever, French language students will be traveling to Martinique, an overseas department of France located in the Caribbean.
In recent years, the global initiatives department has begun offering and encouraging courageous language students to participate in language immersion programs. In June 2024, a select group of Spanish students traveled to Montevideo, Uruguay to participate in a two-week language immersion program at Academia Uruguay, a language school in downtown Montevideo. They also had the opportunity to spend a day at Liceo Pallotti, an independent school much like Tower Hill. We plan to offer the Uruguay program again and complement it with an additional language immersion for French students to the Centre International d’Antibes in southern France, both to be held in June of 2026. These types of immersive experiences are truly transformative for our students and separate a Tower Hill education from many of our peers.
A final cornerstone of the Upper School global education curriculum is the Global Scholars Certificate program. Students apply to the program at the end of their ninth grade year. For the remainder of their Upper School career, accepted students commit to exploring global inquiry from several different vantage points—coursework, service learning, extracurricular activities and a travel experience with Tower Hill. Senior Global Scholars complete a research project as the capstone of the program, choosing a global issue of personal interest and looking at current and future solutions through the lens of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
It’s incredible to be part of a school and wider community that values global education as much as we do at Tower Hill. The global initiatives program is always looking to refine our curriculum and broaden our offerings, and we are hoping to add programs like faculty exchanges, language-specific exchanges and more non-language-based trips in the future.
