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Faces of WMA Meg Lenihan Hutcheson
The first thing you see when you walk into Meg Lenihan Hutcheson’s classroom in the upstairs corner of Old Academy is a very large table with 16 chairs around it. The visual message to students is obvious: everyone sits in the front row.
This is the quintessential Harkness table—the seminar approach that has guided most New England private schools (and many American colleges and universities) in their collective approach to teaching literature. We all read the literature and then we all sit around the table and discuss it. The teacher is at the same level (tabletop) as the students.
The Harkness table approach is at the core of Meg’s teaching philosophy—read wonderful novels, short stories, poems and even occasionally literary analysis; ask good questions and dig into those questions as a group. Go beyond the narrative. Engage the material. Explore the language and the layers. From its inception at Phillips Exeter in the 1930s, this has been the traditional way that literature has been taught at schools like Wilbraham & Monson for nearly a century.
But at closer inspection, the table is actually five small tables pushed together. Like everything in Meg’s approach to teaching, this is not accidental.
The traditional approach is good—sometimes great. But it is not always best for a class or for a particular student. Some students are more comfortable in smaller groups. Some exercises will not work with 15 students around one table. You can get more accomplished and actively engage more students in a class period if they are put in smaller groups and given di erent questions. Put them in charge and see what they come up with and then give them the responsibility of teaching their peers. Be creative. Be innovative. See what works. That is also Meg’s approach.
Meg’s classroom tells you immediately that students are doing remarkable things in this place. On the walls are tributes to authors such as Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Julia Alvarez and Toni Morrison and there is also plenty of student work.
Each student piece on the walls represents an individual student’s artful, thoughtful e ort to “say” something important about a novel or poem—most use images but a few use their words in poems or in framing the work. These include student cutouts of characters, watercolor and color crayon drawings of scenes in novels and short stories, and a few examples from children’s literature (one of Meg’s go-to
Meg Lenihan Hutcheson directing AP Capstone presentations in Shenkman Trading Center.
assignments in AP Literature as the year is winding down for her seniors is to analyze their favorite children’s story using the tools of literary analysis that they have learned to use during the year). Many of these are from AP students who write dozens of papers over the course of the year, but there are other, sometimes more e ective, ways to engage students and teach them something.
As chair of the English Department, this has been Meg’s enduring message: Don’t get stuck in one approach to teaching class because it is comfortable for you. Find the approaches that work for your students.
Meg’s approach in some ways is a result of her background. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she moved to the big city (New York) and went into book publishing, where she hob-nobbed with famous writers and the literary set. She came to teaching as a second career, as a vocation if you will, and she helped establish her English teaching bona fides with an M.A. from Middlebury’s renowned Bread Loaf School of English.
As a result, Meg’s thinking about teaching is not limited by old ideas: She embraces technology (as an educational tool, not as an end in itself). Our conversations over the years have often been about “cool” new software and apps, and a regular part of department meetings has been an invitation to the teachers to share a new approach or new technology that they are using in their classrooms that she calls “best practices,” but it is just as much about creativity and innovation.
No one should confuse this message about exploring other approaches (project-based learning, group work, multimedia approaches to literature, free-writing, etc.) with the idea that English class at WMA is a freeform do-whatever-you-feel-like exercise in playing with words and language.
On the contrary, one of Meg’s major contributions to the school over the past 15-plus years in leadership roles in the department and administration (she was Dean of Curriculum for a handful of years) has been to provide structure and clear-cut goals to the school’s curriculum. Because of Meg, there is a much greater focus on “sca olding” (exercises aimed at specific skill development) assignments/assessments that directly connect to the goals of the curriculum, and “backwards design” (designing a course by determining and defining the goals and working backward week-by-week to lay out the path to achieving those goals).
This productive impulse to structure and define was first evident to me in the English department as we were tasked at each grade level to review our approaches to writing and sync with the grades above and below us. Looking back, it seems obvious. Our student expectations at each grade level were a common theme of our discussions, but no one had bothered in years (if ever) to write it all down and think it through from Point A, where we caught our incoming Upper School students in Grade 9, to Point Z, where we bade farewell to our graduating seniors as they headed o to college.
The result was the development of WMA’s Writing Progression—a sca olded approach to skill development, academic expectations and workload. The focus is primarily on academic writing with an emphasis on literary analysis but it also includes creative and argumentative (rhetoric) writing as well as formal and informal writing.
In a similar vein, Meg reformed the approach to curriculum reading with the concept of “pillar” texts: Each course is built around an essential question (or questions) and the pillar texts address in some way that question (or questions). Each teacher is free to supplement with poems, short stories, essays, podcasts, music, films and, occasionally for the juniors/ seniors, literary criticism. The rationale for this approach was two-fold: Give the teachers an opportunity to bring in texts that they personally connect to; and, more importantly, create opportunities to bring in many di erent perspectives and voices on these essential questions.
Meg Lenihan Hutcheson speaks with advisee Korenna Weiss ’22 during an outdoor Advisory meeting.
The need to consider and hear from a more diverse set of voices took on added significance a couple of years ago when leaders of WMA’s Black Student Union asked to speak to the English Department about the curriculum. In an extraordinary meeting, the three student leaders presented their analysis of the curriculum grade by grade and thoughtfully and respectfully made specific book and author recommendations about how to make the curriculum more diverse and inclusive. To Meg’s great credit, she listened and she heard. Before COVID-19 and the tragic death of George Floyd, the department met o campus in a professional development session to consider how to think about the curriculum and the books we choose for our students. We were given a deceptively simple concept—is the literature in question a window (or lens) on another world, or is it a mirror for us to see the world as it is from perhaps another perspective. Since that time, positive and substantive changes have been made in virtually every full-year English course.
As Dean of Curriculum, “Ms. Hutch” was also instrumental in bringing outside perspectives from other peer schools to review our curriculum and approach. As the then-current department chair, I found the experience to be one of the most useful and productive exercises that we’ve done in the department in my time teaching at WMA. Hearing from teachers from Loomis Cha ee, Berkshire School and Williston Northampton validated many of the changes we were making and also raised great questions about how we were doing it and where we were going.
Meg is also responsible for expanding the Advanced Placement curriculum at WMA as department chair (she tasked me almost 15 years ago with building out AP English Language while she focused on further developing the AP English Literature curriculum). And then later as Dean of Curriculum, Meg brought the College Board’s AP Capstone program, while still in its infancy, to the school, making WMA one of the first 300 schools to adopt the classes. Both AP Seminar and AP Research were added to the English curriculum, and Meg (while still a dean and already teaching AP Lit) took on the responsibility of building out the AP Research curriculum and teaching the class.
At Wilbraham & Monson Academy, teaching doesn’t stop at the end of the school day. It carries into the community that we are a part of. It includes extra help, and Zoom support and coaching and clubs. Some of Meg’s best work has been done outside of the classroom: Her most visible contribution to school life is her oversight of the Global Scholars selection process and her e orts to make Global Scholars a full-year enrichment program for our best and brightest, and not just a travel scholarship. But she has done much more: She was actively involved in bringing back the student literary publication The Rubicon as well as the annual student Writing Contest, and supporting the rebirth of the student newspaper Atlas. Over the years, she has encouraged student writing in many ways—trips o campus to hear (and meet) famous writers, setting up poetry and story readings of student work, and, most recently, helping students start a new club for writers.
But what Meg is proudest of is her work with a group of enthusiastic students a couple years ago to establish the Stone Society, named after 19th century alumna and early feminist Lucy Stone. The group provides a forum for students to discuss gender issues and social justice and to hear outside speakers, including parents and alumni with direct experience with the challenges facing women in such areas as sexual and reproductive health, the glass ceiling in career advancement and the di culties they face in specific fields. The group has been very active since its inception and recently, despite COVID-19, staged a very successful Zoom event with a wide range of speakers on Women in STEM.
What impresses me most about Meg is her love of literature and the way she shares that passion in her classes. This is the part of the job that is not a job. It is what we love—and, in my view, despite all her accomplishments and all her wonderful (and many!) contributions to the school and to our students, it is what makes Meg a great teacher.
Meg Lenihan Hutcheson in the classroom.
Meg Lenihan Hutcheson, left, and Liam Etti ’20 share a light moment.
