Lower School Launches Into Classrooms With Focused In-Service
Earlier this week, Hillcrest teachers found themselves doing what teachers do best when the room is alive: talking over one another, testing ideas, laughing at familiar classroom moments, and picturing the faces of students who will soon fill the halls. The start of the school year is filled with in-service meetings and training.
The theme for the start-of-school training was simple: We don’t repeat training. We revisit truth. The consistency of Hillcrest’s teachers revealed strength in the training sessions. They all hold shared language around the Four Habits of the Heart, TCIT, PRIME, Shepherding the Heart, the Mercy Seat, and the many routines that quietly form the culture of a school at Hillcrest. The truth that’s taught that builds the culture doesn’t change at Hillcrest, but the students inside it do, and that means good training must return to the foundations again and again.
One of those foundations is the Four Habits of the Heart: attentive, obedient, respectful, and responsible. Those words are familiar to teachers and students alike, but this week's training pushed teachers to look beneath them. Instead of asking only whether a student followed the rule, teachers were challenged to ask what the absence of a habit might reveal. What is happening when a student cannot attend? What is driving repeated disobedience? What does disrespect communicate? What might irresponsibility be connected to? Those questions move a teacher from simple behavior management to the much more human work of discipleship and formation.
The room became especially animated when teachers began working through PRIME: Praise, Reflect, Incentivize, Demonstrate, and Enthusiasm. The exercise seemed small at first. Engage a student who usually struggles with transitions, quietly closes a book, pushes in a chair, and gets in line without being reminded. What happens next? In the rush of a school day, moments like that disappear easily because trouble is often louder than quiet obedience. The disruptive student commands attention while the student making a good choice can pass almost invisibly through the room.
PRIME asks teachers to reverse that pattern by becoming deliberate observers of what is good, and then provide students with specific praise. A teacher notices the student who was ready before being asked, the student who showed restraint when frustrated, the student who helped someone without seeking recognition. Then the teacher names it. Not with exaggerated praise, but with words that help the student recognize the impact of their actions in the class and the character being formed in that moment. Over time, those small exchanges become part of the classroom culture because what a teacher consistently notices awakens students to what the community values.
The training moved from there into Shepherding the Heart, where the pieces began to come together in a vivid picture of the culture at Hillcrest. Teachers are not asked merely to stop bad behavior or produce compliant students. They are asked to look at the child beneath the behavior and help that child understand what is happening inside. That changes the central question from, “How do I make this stop?” to, “What is this behavior telling me, and what does this student need to see?”
That kind of work cannot happen well without trust. Teachers talked about the ordinary moments where trust is built long before correction is needed: greeting a student at the door, noticing when someone seems unusually quiet, asking about last night’s game, remembering a family story, sitting beside a student at lunch, or following up on something mentioned days earlier. None of those moments feels dramatic, but together they create the relational ground where a hard conversation can take root to produce lasting fruit.
The final part of the day widened the lens to the repeated rhythms of Hillcrest life. Morning meetings, prayer, chapel, Commonplace Books, classroom routines, transitions, greetings, celebrations, and correction can feel ordinary because they happen so often in the course of a day. Yet those repeated practices are precisely how culture is formed. Students absorb more than what teachers explain to them. They absorb what a school repeatedly does.
A student greeted by name learns that being seen matters. A class that pauses to pray learns that dependence on Christ for focus and discipline is not a weakness. A community that gathers for chapel learns that worship belongs at the center of life. A student who is corrected and then welcomed back learns that accountability and belonging can exist together. The routines may look small from the outside, but repeated over hundreds of school days, they begin shaping instinct, memory, expectation, and character.
That is why Hillcrest keeps returning to these ideas. Culture is not built in one in-service, one new educational approach, one revisit of the handbook, or one strong opening week. It is built in the accumulation of the moments that follow with students. It is built in what teachers repeatedly notice, what they celebrate, what they correct, how they respond under pressure, and what they choose to believe about the student standing in front of them.
So the goal of the day was not to leave teachers with another stack of information or one more thing to do in their classrooms. The result of the in-service was making familiar truths more instinctive. The Four Habits ask what kind of people Hillcrest is forming. TCIT and PRIME shape how teachers respond. Shepherding the Heart asks what is happening beneath the behavior. The school’s daily liturgies make those beliefs tangible in ordinary life.
Together, they point toward the deeper work of the community at Hillcrest. Teachers are not simply running classrooms, delivering lessons, or keeping hallways orderly. They are helping young people learn to attend, obey, respect, take responsibility, receive correction, extend grace, repair relationships, and recognize what is true, good, and beautiful. They are helping students practice ways of living that will matter long after grades, schedules, and school years are forgotten.
That work is slow, demanding, and deeply personal. It happens in crowded classrooms and quiet conversations, in moments of correction and moments of celebration, in the student who gets it right the first time and the student who needs another chance tomorrow. It is the work of shepherding hearts, and at Hillcrest, it remains at the center of what education is meant to be.