Steve Wilkins, Interim Head of School (2024-2025)
Proctor’s health, wellness, and resilience initiatives have led us to investigate the six pillars of lifestyle medicine. Many of us, including incoming Head of School Amy Bonnefond Smucker, who is my co-author on this blog, have drawn the connection between these pillars and Proctor’s decades-long commitment to harnessing the modern neuroscience of learning to ensure better student outcomes. Proctor is moving forward boldly to enjoin these adjacent schools of thought.
Healthy Lifestyle
Lifestyle medicine sets forth its six pillars in a thoughtful framework for adolescents developed by Boston-based Beth Frates, MD. The pillars are:
- Sleep
- Exercise
- Diet
- Stress management
- Social connection
- Avoiding risky substances
Dr. Frates has also created a Teen Lifestyle Medicine curriculum, which seeks to generate adolescents who benefit from improved friendships, self-esteem, resilience, and confidence. Following these principles encourages more creativity, energy, focus, and laughter. We seek to promote goal attainment, healthier body image, and increased academic success and athletic performance. A gorgeous new building, a clinical director, and advanced curricula are propelling the Proctor community in this direction.
How the Brain Learns
Research on how the adolescent brain learns seems to deliver new insights every week. Proctor educators are committed to implementing the core principles of active learning: The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development suggests that it is essential for all educators to design their pedagogy around three primary brain principles: neuroplasticity, the intertwined nature of emotion and cognition, and discarding irresponsible neuromyths such as adjusting teacher according to students’ alleged different learning styles (ASCD, May 28, 2020). We seek to design ever-effective methods for engaging student interest, finding the balance between heightened alertness and emotional regulation, and immersing students in active processing of their learning opportunities. (Building Better Bridges for Learning) We fight against passivity!
The Synthesis
What Proctor is studying, discussing, planning, and implementing is at the intersection of lifestyle pillars and core understanding of how the brain learns. Our goals emphasize teaching students about healthy lifestyle and harnessing the power in their brains.
What if every Proctor graduate understood how to maximize the opportunities placed before them in academics, arts, and athletics? What if they understood how they learn most effectively? Then, what if every Proctor student embraced the notion that a healthy lifestyle enables them to better achieve their goals? What if every Proctor student understood how to positively respond to the inevitable swell of defeat, anxiety, sadness, or stress?
~ Steve Wilkins, Interim Head of School (2024-2025)
The answers to these questions define the work that we are doing in our health, wellness, and resilience programming and, in fact, in the essence of what it means to be a member of the Proctor community.
Amy Bonnefond Smucker, Incoming Head of School (July 2025)
Thank you, Steve, for the opportunity to reflect together on what makes Proctor so uniquely powerful. Over the course of this year, we have shared many meaningful conversations that have served as an essential bridge in this time of leadership transition. Your deep expertise in how the brain learns, combined with your comprehensive perspective on Proctor, has been invaluable as I step into the opportunity to lead this remarkable school into its bright future.
It is clear that Proctor has always prioritized meeting students where they are, knowing how they learn, how to challenge them, and how to support them through both failure and success. This is an essential part of Proctor’s DNA. This moment, however, carries a unique urgency, because the world in which our students are growing up is more complex than it has ever been.
Our students carry significant burdens: the same global stressors we feel, but layered with a digital reality that shapes their journey in countless ways. Their lives play out online and constantly, with thousands of direct and indirect messages coming at them every day through their devices. Their relationship (and ours, as adults, for that matter) with technology is profoundly complex, and it’s impacting their mental health and identity in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
What gives me immense hope and inspiration is Proctor itself: its model, its mission, and especially its faculty and students. Our students are eager to understand themselves. They are open, curious, courageous, and ready to take on meaningful challenges. Proctor’s approach, which is rooted in knowing how students learn and who they are as individuals, equips students for that work. Our role as educators is to continue giving them the tools and self-awareness to do so, not just academically, but as whole people.
To your point, Steve, this is where the pillars of lifestyle medicine and the science of learning intersect so powerfully. Knowing how to care for themselves, how to sleep well, manage stress, eat mindfully, and connect with others meaningfully, becomes foundational to how Proctor students learn and live. These are not simply good habits; they are essential tools for thriving beyond Proctor.
Imagine every young person leaving Proctor with a clear understanding of what brings them energy, what calms their anxiety, what helps them fully engage in learning, and how they recover from challenge. Our students will build that clarity together, in the Proctor community, where they are known, valued, challenged, and deeply supported.
~ Amy Bonnefond Smucker, Incoming Head of School (July 2025)
That is the work that I see happening at Proctor, and we have both the opportunity and responsibility to lean into it boldly. It is what makes me so excited about what lies ahead. Thank you for welcoming me into this conversation. I am honored and inspired to be on this incredible journey with Proctor and the remarkable community that calls this place home.
Read More about Incoming Head of School Amy Bonnefond Smucker
- Community and Relationships
- Head of School
- Health and Wellness
- Learning and the Brain