What Do You Want to Say?

By Patrick T. Gallagher, Head of School

I attended graduate school, part-time and during the summer, when I was working as a full-time teacher. All of my classmates were also educators at different stages of our careers. One day, in a class on human learning, the professor put a question to us: “What can every student at your school do?”

The seemingly straightforward question tripped up a great many classmates. When we first ventured responses, the professor pushed back gently. “Every student? Every single one?” he asked, with a raised eyebrow. As we outlined skills–“critical thinking,” for example–he pressed us to think of something more discrete or concrete. What every student would be able to do, he said, should be unmistakably clear to anyone who might visit our schools. We should be able to say with confidence that it was, therefore, an accomplishment of the school’s. We struggled to reply with clarity and confidence.

Thankfully, one accomplishment of every student at our school came to mind: At US, every graduate delivers to the school community an original speech.

Most senior speeches follow much the same format. As the familiar music summons boys to the auditorium to start the day, the day’s senior speaker and his introducer nervously find their seats. The Director of the Upper School enters, shakes their hands, takes his seat, and reviews the day’s announcements. A parent waves from the visitors’ seats while another readies the iPhone to record the long-awaited occasion. Afterwards, as many boys compete to remove their neckties before their buddies, students and staff congratulate the speaker with handshakes and hugs.

Like so many accomplishments, though–for the student and for the School–the Senior Speech is just one part of the story, one frame of the motion picture of the experience.

The speech does not just happen. The speaker has been rehearsing it with a faculty member right up until that morning. Three weeks before, that same senior, a team captain, was entrusted by his coaches to inspire his teammates before the big game. A year before, he had addressed his English 11 class in the hopes of becoming a finalist in the Sherman Prize Speaking Contest. Five years before, he had talked through both his successes in math and his challenges in English as he led his own sponsor conference. Eight years before, he regaled his entire family with all had learned about China in his fourth grade theme study. He had perhaps never spoken before at US in quite that way, but he had been speaking–and finding his own voice–for as long as he had been at US.

Whenever I tour newcomers to the US Hunting Valley Campus, I pause to walk into or at least pause over What Do You Want to Say? Patrick T. Gallagher, Head of School SPRING 2025 17 the classrooms in the English Department. Partly, I am nostalgic about the department that first brought me to US as a teacher two decades ago. Mostly, though, I am eager to explain to the uninitiated the virtues of the student-centered instruction so foundational to students’ studies of the humanities at US. Entering from the Class of ’71 Commons, the wall adjacent the staircase designates the Thomas Temple Keeler ’39 Wing. Beneath that signage are the words “For Boys, By Design.” Perhaps nowhere is that design more evident than in the rooms lining the second-story hall. In a discipline that so values storytelling, each room itself tells a story.

The space is intimate by design. It can only fit so many students, limiting class enrollment and ensuring the close-knit environment of the school. Each room is dominated by a table. Anyone who has ever taught with old-fashioned tablet desks arranged in a circle knows the difference. The empty space between and among students can be a vacuum for their focus, while the unbroken plane of the table encourages eye-to-eye engagement and draws students into conversation.

The table is central in the classroom and central to the experience of the class. In 1931, inspired by discussion tables named for benefactor Edward Harkness, Phillips Exeter Academy instructor Henry S. Couse described the transformation in his practice:


At this point, I have taught in most every classroom in the department. They are all but indistinguishable for me because what is most important is what they all have in common, the table. The table is a level intellectual playing field for sharing and exploring ideas. The table is an anvil on which ideas are shaped and reshaped by others affirming and challenging them. The table is a forum for students to find their voices.

A few years ago, a former student who had just graduated from college and I reconnected on a visit to campus. He recalled, fondly, his English and History classes at US and especially the discussions–which he remembered as spirited, even heated, right up to the end of class. Moreover, he appreciated that, once the bell had rung, more often than not, everyone would head out into the hall and could be not only civil but also friendly to one another. He recognized that his classmates and he respected one another’s voices, even as they refined or asserted their own. The School motto–Responsibility, Loyalty, Consideration–expects nothing less.

“We are what we repeatedly do,” wrote the American philosopher and historian Will Durant.

To that end, so that the senior might one day take the stage, the encouragement of students’ expression and the cultivation of students’ communication happen daily at US.

A common sight here is that of a single student sitting alongside his teacher. This is usually during a shared “free” period, when neither is scheduled in the school day, and can be among the most meaningful experiences for both student and teacher.

Students seek the guidance of their teachers for all manner of assignments. However, like the Senior Speech from the stage at US, the college application essay is a task most US students take seriously. They recognize its audience goes beyond their teacher and that its purpose is more consequential than most assignments. They know it matters.

What students do not always see is the opportunity. While other applicants might boast similar academic profiles, the essay is the chance to be unique. Still, the significance of the essay–just how much it seems to matter–can cloud a student’s perspective and muddle his message. Feedback from others, however well-intentioned, is often very evident in the draft by the time he shares it with his college counselor. The result can be a cacophony of voices drowning out the student’s own.

Thankfully, veteran teachers have a trick up their sleeves given the candor of a relationship built of trust over time. Simply asking “What do you want to say here?” can spur the student to be more direct, eloquent, and authentic. Saying “Write that down” is then liberating and empowering. We are encouraging students to be themselves, and not only are their essays the better for it, they–and our school–are the better for it.