Leadership interview with Catherine Hant, St. Mildred's-Lightbourn School

I love the people, the variety, and the positive energy. I'm a people person, so I was really excited to meet students and families coming to a new school. It was just really important to me to meet the people who chose to come to this school in the same way I chose to come. I'm popping into classrooms, saying hello to the staff in our various departments. Getting to know them and their stories and the reasons why they're here. 

There's a chunk of the day that I'm usually allocating to planning and strategy. That might be on my own. It might be with a small group of my senior leadership team, or it might be members of my board.

There is usually a school event or two at the end of the day. It might be a sporting event, it might be performances, concerts, and often those take up some time in the evening as well. But lots of variety.

In the context of our school, we potentially have students up to 14 years of time. So through three divisions of the school, a junior, middle, and a senior school,... I think we're constantly thinking about how each of those milestones are going to look a little different, are exciting and challenging and yet developmentally appropriate.

I think that their journey is one where they feel supported and known. The size of the school is conducive to that with a student body of about 550 students. The sheer pathways that our students take in the school allow for lots of interaction and interconnections between students across divisions.

I think their journey is one of seeing themselves as a member of a community. There's lots of positive interaction that happens between our younger and older and middle students. They start to see themselves at those incremental stages as they travel through the school but also can see how those different groups of students are involved in the life of our community.

This is my first year here at St. Mildred's-Lightbourn School, but one of the things that I've definitely noticed is that there is a very high percentage of teachers and staff that have been here for over 10 years. I think that that speaks a lot to the culture of the school. In my understanding of other schools, it's very low.

I'm struck by our senior school students this year, and I think that they do exemplify the values that we hope our students will attain. And so those might include things like certainly confidence and voice, but yet nicely positioned to balance with humility. I feel like our students have, because of their experiences in our program over time, they've developed a global mindset, and yet they're also very locally active. I think that they've developed some important attributes that really are going to serve them well beyond the academic life that they will have at post-secondary school. I really see the mission, I guess, in action in this idea that we're empowering women to be service-oriented and think about being active members of their communities.

I had a window of opportunity to be in a girls' school, and that was actually here at St. Mildred's-Lightbourn School for Grades 4, 5, and 6. The only environment that I felt like I was able to be confident in was actually in the sporting realm. The idea of belonging to sports in a team, and those are single-gender experiences, right? When you're on a girls rowing team or I was on the swim team. I think I was drawn personally to the single-gender environment. 

I've just got so many examples of where I've seen girls flourish in this environment. They've entered into schools quite timid and cautious, and they've graduated being confident, empowered women.

I've come to know that many of the alumni come back to live in Oakville, and there are some very intentional experiences that we create here that allow for that mentorship. One in particular would be the Grade 11 internship experience. In the Grade 11 year, all of our students have an opportunity to be immersed in a professional internship, which means they're essentially doing a co-op in an industry or a profession of their interest. This is where our alumni have been tremendously helpful in remaining connected with the school and wanting to give this sense of giving back, but also providing mentorship for our students as they make some choices about where they might like to go on and study in post-secondary education. Anything from dentistry to working in a theatre, to working in a business office or being mentored and working alongside an entrepreneur. There's just a lot of variety. That's been a really nice partnership.

We also have a very active alumni association who are involved in events like our Millie Christmas that just took place. I think their presence in the school on an ongoing basis also impacts the relationship between students and how they can see themselves in the future. But also that network is just really strong and supportive. It might depend on the age group.

I think students are looking for opportunities to challenge and try new things. So this idea that they're maybe going to get outside of their comfort zone, but also want to know that they're going to have support.

So this idea of almost high expectations with high support, I think, is an environment that students could be drawn to, the opportunity to develop leadership. They want to be in a place, I think, where their voice is seen, they are heard, and they're respected. I think that that's what we offer here at St. Mildred's-Lightbourn School.

We're an inquiry-based school, so we're looking for a lot of integration in project work for our Junior and Middle School students. Some kids prefer to work a little bit more individually, and that's not the environment that we have. We're trying to create an atmosphere of collaboration, this idea that you build and construct knowledge and understanding with others. Maybe kids who are more competitive might not love this environment because it is that idea of the collective, that you're a part of a much larger group of learners. Although there is competition, and opportunities to excel individually, there's a lot of emphasis on collaboration and working with your peers. I think this is an important life skill. When we're thinking about the aptitudes and attributes that we need our students to succeed in the future, these are important skills for them to have practice with as they're young learners and they're developing their mindset concepts.

We're always thinking about the students first. One thing that stands out for me certainly is that the student truly is at the centre of everything that we do here, the decisions that we're making around the environment, the programming, the opportunities to develop themselves as human beings.

It’s a very open and inclusive environment and culture. I also see that in the way that our staff and faculty work together as well. I think that the culture is one of inclusion. I think that goes back to your previous question about the retention of our staff. I think it says a lot about the working conditions and the working environment.

I also would say that the culture is one of learning. It's been so wonderful to watch all of the staff in our school embrace opportunities to learn, to collect feedback, to try to improve practice. I think we're modelling for our students every day what we hope for them in their learning environment. I think it's important that the adults around them are embracing that and it's infused into the culture and the environment. There's a lot of excitement around involvement.

I think we're just one year farther away from the pandemic, where we're embracing opportunities for parents to come into the school and learn alongside and with their daughters. That can be everything from our Middle School just had presentations on their problem-based learning projects, and parents and faculty and staff at the school were all invited to be a part of those audiences. But then there was an engagement piece to that where they could get involved. We've had Millie Mornings, where we've got parents coming into junior school classrooms and doing some activities with their kids in the spaces that they inhabit every day, which I think is important, opening dialogue between teachers and the families. Again, I think it's a smaller school, and so those unstructured opportunities for staff to be walking by and joining groups of learners in our collaboration spaces during our assemblies or presentations, I think also contributes to that culture. But really, it's an inviting environment for everybody to be collaborative and working together.

Our approach to social and inter-student conflict, I think, is actually grounded in our teaching pedagogy, which is one of keeping the student at the centre and approaching things with an inquiry lens. So trying to listen very carefully and listen for understanding. What we know about children is that the impact of words and actions, regardless of the intent, can have a tremendous effect on how they see themselves and how they can learn or not learn in an environment. … We recognize that when children are younger, there's a lot of learning and missteps that happen with their social relationships. We also have to treat those opportunities for them to learn and to realize that there may have been other choices they could have made. Using those teachable moments to really try and change behaviour. But then also partnering with parents and being really open about the things that we're working on, the things that we're seeing and we're actioning in the school environment, but how they are of support at home so that the dialogue can continue, but also the language and the strategies that we're using can be continuous between school and home.

I think this is one of the things that happens in a single-gender environment, too, is that we're consciously really thinking about the social development of our students, being very proactive and trying to front-end things that we think are likely to happen at certain stages of development. If we can continue to weave those learnings into the program and into the experiences of the students before they happen, then that also gives us a reference point to come back to…. We know that at a very young age, they go through these stages of parallel play, and then they're learning how to negotiate friendships. We know that threesomes are really tricky. Teachers keeping their eyes on the social interactions of our students, but anticipating what's going to be challenging in Middle School, what's going to happen when we have an influx of new students coming in, because when you have new students coming in wanting to develop some relationships, then that potentially means a split from a relationship that's been established for a long period of time.

What I do know from previous experiences of our students and staff is that we are very locally active. Some of that speaks to the service opportunities our kids are involved in, like the Kerr Street Mission, for example. We're doing a joint project with an organization called.

One of the projects we're just getting underway is a partnership with Art House, which is a local organization that was established to provide after-school programming for underserviced areas of Oakville, Burlington, Mississauga, and provide art programming for students who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunities. And so our students are going to be involved in a collaborative art project with them in the new year.

Our students are also involved locally through the internship program. And so certainly we're leaning on the local industries and businesses to consider placement of our students in their organizations. That also just strengthens our connection, I think, with the community at large. We also have a relationship with St. Jude's Church and St. Cuthbert's Church here in Oakville, both our Anglican schools. That is our origin as a school. We're an Anglican-based school originally. The relationship with those churches and then the program and services that they provide to the local community are things that we're tapping into as well.

I have a background in admissions, and so I lived this experience for many years. One of the things that I came to know is how critical it is for parents to get into the school and speak to students and teachers. Because I think when you can see the mission of a school in action, you can see in front of you examples of how students are learning, how they conduct themselves, how people in the building interact with one another, you can truly get a sense of what that school and community and place is like. That helps families determine whether or not it's a fit I often say—it's like walking into a house. You walk into a house and you see yourself in the space or you don't. You're thinking to yourself, Can this be home for me? I think for families and students, this is really important because we spend more waking hours with children in the day than their families do at home. This place needs to feel like a place where they can see themselves and they can be themselves. I think through the admissions process, it's really important to get in the spaces, meet the people who are going to be a part of your daughter's daily life.