Gill Stuart holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an M.A.T. from the Rhode Island School of Design’s Liberal Arts program, where his graduate research examined the relationship between visual literacy and textual analysis in adolescent readers. He spent three years teaching English in the Providence Public Schools before joining Clarebourne, an experience he considers formative in his understanding of what rigorous literacy instruction actually requires — and what it looks like when it is absent. He teaches Grade 7 and Grade 8 English, runs the division’s Socratic Seminar series, and coaches the Middle School debate team.
He is known among students for his insistence that the quality of a question is as assessable as the quality of an answer — and for a habit of writing students’ most interesting in-class observations on the board without comment, returning to them at the end of the period to ask whether anyone has changed their mind.
“A student who can ask a question that intersects a conversation — who can identify the assumption everyone else has been taking for granted — has learned something more durable than any content I could teach them.”
Middle School English · Grades 7–8 · Clarebourne since 2014