Celia Thaxter holds a B.A. in English and Education from Connecticut College and an M.Ed. in Literacy and Language from Lesley University, where her research focused on the transition from narrative to analytical writing in students ages nine through twelve — the precise developmental moment her current teaching spans. Before Clarebourne she taught for five years at the Lincoln School in Providence, where she led the Grade 5 writing program and piloted a cross-disciplinary literacy initiative with the history department. She now teaches the upper Lower School and lower Middle School English sequence, a position she considers the most intellectually demanding in the department and the one she would least like to give up.
Her particular gift is for the student who writes fluently but without precision — the child who fills a page easily and says very little. She has developed a series of revision exercises, used across Grades 4 through 6, that teach students to interrogate their own sentences for the claim they are actually making. Several of her colleagues in other departments have adopted them.
“The students who worry me are not the reluctant writers. They’re the fluent ones who’ve learned that volume substitutes for thought. My job with those students is to slow them down — to make them ask, after every sentence, whether they’ve actually said anything.”
Middle School English · Grades 4–6 · Clarebourne since 2018