What is Brown Summer High School?

Brown Summer High School is a daytime program, and is open to Providence-area high school students.  Brown Summer High School (BSHS) challenges local students to engage their minds in tackling big questions. BSHS students become active participants in the learning experience, and develop essential skills in reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking.

Teaching Faculty

Courses are taught by teams of students enrolled in the Master of Arts in Teaching and Undergraduate Teacher Education programs at Brown University.

Teaching teams are led by exemplary mentor teachers from local schools. Teacher Education faculty supervise and collaborate with each of the teams.

Essential Questions Courses

Often, people have big questions on their minds. Questions like: What makes you step up to the plate and do something? Whose stories haven’t been heard in U.S. History? How can the design of living things be explained? Most courses in high school do not address such far-reaching questions. There is not enough time, there is too much material to cover, or it just doesn’t fit into one “subject area.” At Brown Summer High School, we focus on these big questions.

Brown Summer High School’s “Essential Questions” courses all begin with a big question that doesn’t necessarily have one right answer. You will have a chance to explore the question by studying it from a variety of perspectives. You will work individually, in small groups, and as a class. At the end of the course, you will have a chance to show others what you have learned, not by taking a test, but more creatively, in a way that you and your teachers design together.

Las clases en Brown Summer High School empiezan con una pregunta esencial para la cual no necesariamente hay una sola respuesta. La mayoría de los cursos en las escuelas ecundarias no logran discutir ideas tan profundas para desarrollar la mentalidad del estudiante. En este programa los alumnos tendrán la oportunidad de explorar las preguntas de forma individual, en grupos pequeños, y con la clase entera. Al final del curso, podran demostrar lo que han aprendido, no con tomar un examen, sino de una manera más creativa que será diseñada con los maestros.

2011 Summer Courses

BSHS students will participate in two of the following courses

What is Freedom? (English)

How does the fight for freedom during a revolution shape people and their decisions? In times of change, we have the choice to obey, revolt, or create a new path. How do we choose our loyalties? Through reading and performing the novel Chains, we will consider loyalty, deception, and freedom in both the American Revolution and more contemporary revolutions.

Who should protect the rights of the powerless from the powerful? (Social Studies/History)

 What rights are all humans entitled to? Are some rights more important than others? What should we do to protect the rights of people around the world? Through readings, discussions, and multimedia presentations, we will explore the history of human rights and how it relates to current events and struggles for power. 

How do scientists find out about objects, living things, and natural phenomena? (Science)

What are the ingredients of discovery and invention? We will investigate the scientific processes that uncover original ideas about how the world works. Working in science laboratories, we will develop a project leading to new discoveries and present our findings at a final poster session.

(Brown Summer High School 2011)