A Vision of Education for the Modern World: Gunn Welcomes New Academic Leaders

Dr. Fleishman provides oversight for the Academic Office, the College Counseling Office, the Center for Academic Excellence, and the school’s Department Chairs. She hopes to continue to grow a deep culture of educational excellence at Gunn in a way that expands the variety and challenge of the curriculum and surfaces in the daily teaching and learning practices of the community. 

Dr. Fuller’s work is centered on helping students to develop the human skills they will need to be successful in the age of AI. Dr. Fuller is charged with working across the whole of the school — with Athletics, the Dean of Students Office, the faculty, and Academics — to integrate the school’s vision of education for the modern world. 

“These human skills and values are formed throughout a student’s Gunn experience, not just in the classroom,” Dr. Fuller said. “I'm excited to bring a focus on human skills to everything across the school, as we continue to cultivate in our students skills such as confidence, resilience, perceptiveness, good judgment, and speaking plainly and powerfully.”

Taking Our Founding Ideals to the Next Chapter
While those skills are rooted in Frederick and Abigail Gunn’s founding ideals, Dr. Fuller is seeking to take them to the next chapter. For example, Highlanders have long practiced public speaking at Gunn by presenting their Junior Speech in front of the entire school. In Dr. Fuller’s Modern World History class this year, he is taking a more practical approach, asking his students to practice speaking in front of a group every time they speak or read aloud. He imagines this spilling out across the campus, to include inspirational halftime speeches delivered by team captains. “It's much more about frequency, rather than a couple of big speeches,” he said.

Raised in England and Australia, Dr. Fuller studied neuroscience at the University of Melbourne before attending the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He completed an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in Theology (Ethics) at Oxford, and later earned a master’s degree in counseling and human development. He is a licensed therapist. His work and interests are at the intersection of education, psychology, and the humanities, with a focus on human growth and the development of inner maturity.

Dr. Fuller has taught and mentored students in a range of settings, including Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. He has led courses on philosophy and emotional life at The School of Life in London. He also spent four years as junior dean at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, supporting more than 300 students in academic and residential life. He worked as a project leader at Boston Consulting Group in New York, and earlier at the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet on a project exploring character and virtue. Most recently, he founded Toolbox Health, a healthcare and therapy company integrating insights from psychology and the humanities to support well-being and growth.

Asked what drew him to Gunn, he said: “I really care about how to create a place that forms good people and good citizens. That's been my passion for a long time. How do we help young people become the kinds of people and citizens our society needs? That's what gets me up in the morning. I like Gunn in particular because it's already been going in this direction for a long time, and there's a chance now to do what Gunn's always been doing, but in a stepped-up way and for the AI era. What’s great about it is, we're not doing any 90-degree turns. It’s just taking what we're already doing and integrating it and advancing it.”

His work as a junior dean at Oxford, his studies in human development, and his love of education have prepared him well for his new role. Reflecting on the years he spent learning in a Montessori school in Australia, he said: “I always look back to that time and I loved it so much. I think that set me off with a lifelong love of learning.”

A School That is Embracing the Future and Forward-Thinking
A California native, Dr. Fleishman attended boarding school at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. She has spent half of her teaching career at boarding schools, where she has taught, coached, led teams of faculty, and worked as a head house parent, most recently at the nearby Hotchkiss School, also in Connecticut.

Dr. Fleishman previously taught English at The Pennington School in New Jersey and The Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles. She earned her Ph.D. in English and in film and media studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where she designed and taught a series of English courses for undergraduates. Prior to completing her doctorate, Dr. Fleishman received a bachelor’s degree in English and Italian studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in English from University College London. Her essays have appeared in various popular and peer-reviewed publications.

One of the things she is most looking forward to is teaching AP Literature & Composition this year. “We are starting the year by reading some philosophy and critical essays that lay the groundwork for the interpretation of literature. Then we are going to complete a decelerated observation, which is probably going to include a field trip. We will go and look at one art object, which the students can choose, for a couple of hours. Then students will write an essay that integrates the experience of looking at that one object for a concerted period of time with some of the ideas they have learned about from the critical essays we’ve read. It’s really an exercise in perceptiveness. That is one of the values Jack and I are trying to grow in students and figure out how to evaluate as educators,” she said. “We have to actually create opportunities for students to slow down and learn attentiveness, to spend a lot of time with one thing, to continuously focus their observations on it, and to use their discernment to analyze it with care.”

On why she chose Gunn, Dr. Fleishman said: “I was really drawn to the compelling origin story of the school and the way the school has mined its history as the material for a really authentic set of mission and value statements. At the same time, the school is embracing the future and is forward-thinking, and on the edge of what teaching is going to look like in the coming century. That attachment to history and energy for the future made it seem like a very special place.”

In addition, Dr. Fleishman said she was drawn to Gunn by Dr. Emily Raudenbush Gum’s leadership as Head of School. “Emily is the kind of educator I want to work with for the next phase of my career,” she said. “She genuinely cares about kids, she has a clear educational vision, and she wants to collaborate with others to make sure every day at the school is better than the last for all of the students who come here.” 

While Dr. Fleishman and Dr. Fuller have different professional backgrounds, what they share is a passion for academic excellence. This summer, they led a group of faculty who were invited to read a text and talk abstractly and practically about how they might pilot initiatives to bring the human skills into their classrooms. Together, Dr. Fuller and Dr. Fleishman are collaborating to bring micro- and macro-level thinking to the school, the big picture of whole-child development, and the day-to-day experiences that will make student learning at Gunn more engaging.