For three weeks every January, Brooks School stops running a normal schedule entirely. No block periods, no juggling six subjects at once, just one class, chosen in advance, studied in real depth. It’s called Winter Term, and it’s one of the most distinctive academic traditions at any New England boarding school.
Quick Answer for Busy Parents
Winter Term is Brooks School’s annual three-week, one-topic course of study held every January, built around the idea of “depth over breadth.” Students choose from roughly 30 courses spanning inquiry, adventure, and service, everything from SCUBA certification to interior design, and the term culminates in a public Symposium where classes present their work to the community.
What Winter Term Actually Is
Rather than splitting January into the usual rotation of classes, Brooks moves first-semester final exams before winter break and pushes the start of second semester to February, opening up a genuine three-week block for Winter Term. Every student, across every grade, takes exactly one course for the full three weeks, working far more closely with their teacher and classmates than a standard class period allows. The goal, in the school’s own words, is to put “depth over breadth” into practice, in service of Brooks’ broader mission as a New England boarding school providing the most meaningful educational experience its students will have.
That structural choice, rearranging the entire academic calendar around a single three-week block, is itself a signal of how seriously Brooks treats the program. It isn’t an enrichment week bolted onto a normal semester; it replaces normal scheduling entirely, which means faculty and students alike commit to it as a genuine academic term, not an extended field trip.
How Courses Get Chosen
The process starts each fall, when Brooks faculty brainstorm a master list of course proposals across three categories: inquiry (research, questions, reflection), adventure (moving beyond a comfort zone through action), and service (understanding a student’s role in the wider community). Students review the published course catalog and rank their preferences, and Brooks’ academic deans make the final placements, generally giving each student one of their top choices. A small number of highly motivated students propose and design their own Independent course each year.
Full-Day and Half-Day Options
For students who want more variety, Winter Term also offers a half-day track, in which students take two shorter courses across different disciplines instead of immersing in a single full-day class.
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From SCUBA Certification to Car Repair: What Students Study
Winter Term’s course list changes every year, but some classes have become genuine Brooks institutions. Students in SCUBA earn a real diving certification, in some years traveling to complete it; Car Wars has students take apart and rebuild engines; Walking Boston gets students exploring the city’s history on foot for three weeks straight. Newer courses have covered artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and even walking Spain’s 80-mile El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route.
| Category | Example Courses |
| Inquiry | A Taste of Ancient Greece; Lying with the Truth: Don’t Be Manipulated by Numbers |
| Adventure | SCUBA Diving; Shredding 101 (snowboarding); The Great Outdoors (ice climbing) |
| Service | Passion to Pass It On (nonprofit fundraising) |
| Long-Running Favorites | Car Wars; Mock Trial; Walking Boston |
The term wraps up with the Winter Term Symposium, a public open house where every class presents what it built or learned, drawing hundreds of family members, students, and faculty into the academic buildings for a single evening.
The variety across categories is deliberate. A student who wants to go further in an existing passion can do that through an inquiry-track course, while a student looking to be pushed outside their comfort zone entirely might choose an adventure-track class instead. Service-track courses, meanwhile, connect Winter Term directly to Brooks’ broader emphasis on community and character, rather than treating those values as separate from the academic program.
Why Winter Term Matters for Applicants
Winter Term is a genuine signal of how Brooks thinks about learning: not just as content delivery, but as immersion, collaboration, and a willingness to try something entirely outside a student’s comfort zone. Families evaluating Brooks against other boarding schools should ask specifically how a prospective student might use Winter Term, since the answer says as much about fit as any academic statistic. It’s exactly the kind of detail that separates a school parents get wrong on paper from one that’s a genuine fit in practice.
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