Our Mission
The Heights Forum is a department of The Heights School. We assist parents, school leaders, and teachers in their own efforts to educate boys into men fully alive. Through in-person and digital resources we share our experience in forming the hearts and minds of boys, and invite you to join the conversation.
Inside The Heights: Spring Campus Visits Underway
Spring at The Heights brings more than just cherry blossoms; it welcomes visitors to campus. Our spring visit cycle is in full swing, and we’ve had the pleasure of hosting 10 institutions from across the country and beyond. Notably, we recently welcomed four school leaders from Hong Kong for a week-long immersion in The Heights culture and philosophy of education. Opening our doors to teachers and administrators is an essential part of sharing our vision and approach to educating boys. As one visitor put it, “If you merely describe it,...
A Parent-Teacher Conference for the Everyman
As a Valley veteran, Tom Steenson has seen patterns emerge from his two decades of parent-teacher conferences. He invites us to sit down for a not-so-hypothetical conference featuring the recurring advice he offers to the parents of his lower school students. In short, Mr. Steenson hopes to encourage parents in their parental authority and to help them identify (or sometimes even invent) opportunities for growth in their young men. Chapters: 3:25 Encourage parental instincts 7:03 Trust in the long game 9:02 “Better late than early”TM 11:38 Exercise his accountability 20:05...
Professional Development on the Road
Andrew Reed, Middle School Head and Leaders Initiative Director, recently led a day-long workshop for teachers at Summit Academy, focusing on the vocation and mission of teachers. In his first session, Andy outlined three levels of a teacher’s vocation: forming the mind in the context of a single class, forming the person in the context of a school, and forming the whole person in the context of a family. He encouraged teachers to widen the scope of how they see their work, to understand that they are called to not...
Hopeful Parents, Hopeful Sons
By Alvaro de Vicente
The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on his writing. Over a century ago, the great Catholic writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote about the distinction between the supernatural virtue of hope and the disposition popularly referred to as “optimism.” On the eve of his reception into the Catholic Church, Chesterton was struck by the Penny Catechism’s teaching that the two sins against hope are presumption...