The Besant Hill academic experience is characterized by a thoughtful and intentional approach blending intellectual challenge with individualized instruction catered to the specific needs of each learner. Our faculty grounds their pedagogy within a Universal Design for Learning framework, leveraging our small class sizes to evaluate the needs of their students and adjust instruction and assessment accordingly. This approach results in classrooms that abound with creative and collaborative energy directed towards learning developmentally-appropriate skills, content, and meta-cognitive approaches we hope students will carry with them long after they leave Besant Hill.

The Besant Hill curriculum similarly reflects our intention to create individualized and learner-centered classroom experiences. Blending opportunities for access to unlimited Advanced Placement (AP) courses, contemporarily relevant elective courses across all disciplines, and expansive offerings in the arts, our students are able to, each year, craft a schedule that suits their passions and interests while adhering to the University of California’s A-G graduation requirements. Additionally, our STEAM program provides students opportunities to engage in discipline-specific studies of subjects such as Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, and Biology among others, while also creating experiences that allow students to engage in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies blending these related fields of study.

The result of this blend of curricula and pedagogy is classrooms brimming with intellectual creativity and risk-taking. Our students are asked to actively engage in challenging and relevant work that seeks to value and grow the whole learner, nurturing the intellectual and the social-emotional self, while privileging the learning process. In short, our goal is to help students discover how to learn, not what to learn, with the goal of creating life-long learners who will embody our community of Aun Apredo, or “I am still learning.”