Professional development for all members of a private-independent school is more than just a "perk" to be given if the budget allows. Tools and techniques often change faster than we can adapt, and without specialized instruction for teachers and administrators, a school can quickly lose its edge.
At Malvern Preparatory School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, professional development for its teachers takes top priority. Head of School Christian Talbot spared a moment last month to talk with us about how the need for student-centered learning sparked a specialized training program for Malvern’s teachers—their own Summer Institute, where the instructors get instructed.
Augustinian Roots and a Student-Centered Tradition
Malvern takes pride in its history as an Augustinian Catholic school, which emphasizes St. Augustine’s educational philosophy. “St. Augustine’s writings on education are very much about journeying toward the truth, as opposed to capturing it in one fell swoop out of a book—and understanding that people make lots of mistakes,” Christian said with a wry smile, adding that the saint had been far from saintly and had led “quite a life” before making his conversion to Catholicism.
But the idea of education as a journey rather than a “once and done” event made student-centered learning a logical evolution of the school’s current program, rather than a foreign concept, as Christian told us.
“Augustine and his own life experience was […] about learning not from someone telling him the things he needed to know, but in relationships with teachers and peers, having truth brought out of [students]—it’s very much an active learning or a ‘learning by doing’ approach.
“[And so,] the current vision is radically student-centered. It’s predicated on the idea that a learning environment in which the teacher is the center of the experience is no longer viable. I’m not sure it ever really was, but in the 21st Century, it’s clearly not a way to help kids learn effectively and authentically.”
Teaching the Teachers
To achieve that vision, Christian and the other members of his school’s Academic Leadership Team—the Assistant Head, the Upper and Middle School Heads, and the Director of 21st Century Learning—formed the Summer Institute, a two-week, intensive program for teachers, designed to represent the same teaching approach that the teachers must emulate in their own classrooms.
Each year will focus on one of the three primary components or “pillars” that the Academic Leadership Team has identified as essential for a student-centered learning environment: assessment, pedagogy, and curriculum. With the program in its third year, the 2015 Summer Institute will focus on curriculum, but the format will remain generally unchanged from its first session, as Christian explained.
“The first cycle (which deals with assessment) is really organized around the question: How do you know when a student has learned? What are the data that tell you that a student has learned? And, as a student is moving toward the goals that you’ve set for the learning, how can you, as the teacher, provide really precise and timely feedback to help that student grow?
“As curators of the experience, we bring together lots of different resources—articles, books, videos when it’s appropriate—and then we unleash the teachers on the question or the problem to be solved. […] We put them in teams, and because they’ve already read, and processed, and discussed these resources that we’ve curated for them, as a team their goal is to collaborate one or more solutions to the problem, or one or more responses to the challenge that we’ve put to them.”
The resulting conclusions result in wide and varied solutions to the problem. Far from standardizing a universal school approach to education, Christian emphasized that every teacher has the autonomy and creative control to apply student-centered teaching techniques to his or her unique classroom, adding that “It would be not only inefficient but foolish for the Academic Leadership Team to pretend that we know better than teachers how to design instruction and assess students!”
Resistance and Results
Christian admitted that he has a great Board of Trustees and Finance Committee, both of which jumped at the chance to make a difference to their students by focusing on what Christian calls the “greatest point of leverage a school has”—its teachers. With professional development for the teachers the top priority, getting the resources and support to pull off the Summer Institute was assured.
But its participants were slightly leery of the new program. Christian believed that there were “two forms of resistance” from teachers when approached with the new idea: psychological and logistical.
The first existed simply because the Summer Institute was an unknown quantity in a previously predictable world. “Whenever you have something that’s new and unknown, it’s very scary,” Christian said, admitting that the Academic Leadership Team experienced its own doubts and worries about the program. (After all, they’d never done this before!)
But Christian and his cohorts are fans of “failing quickly and failing forward.” They believed that it was important for themselves and their instructors to “model healthy risk-taking.” When something’s this important—as professional development was to the future of the school and its students—you do what needs doing, simply because you “can’t afford not to do this right now.”
As for the latter issue of logistics, Malvern’s teachers had grown accustomed to having the summer months free from school obligations. Many had summer jobs or family obligations and were loathe to give them up. The immediate solution to this issue was to make the Summer Institute voluntary for all teachers as the culture shifted to accommodate this new expectation—but advancement in the school’s career ladder was tied to participation and completion of the program.
Despite these misgivings, Christian believes that the Summer Institute has fundamentally changed how the school delivers its mission and offers education to its students, particularly concerning teamwork. Teachers have moved from an isolated, internalized structure to one that encourages cooperation among peers. He looks forward to a day when the Summer Institute will expand to include teachers from other private-independent schools.
But to those looking to replicate Malvern’s professional development at their own schools, Christian offers this advice.
"I would encourage [schools] to think about three things, in this order:
"First, what’s the vision of learning that’s aligned with your mission, but that’s also aligned with what you believe to be the future of learning. That’s going to be diverse. Some schools will put technology first, and that can be a totally legitimate way of approaching the question. Schools like Malvern will put technology second, only in support of another picture of learning. But first and foremost, you have to understand how the vision you have for learning stems from your mission.
"The second thing is to align all of your resources to that vision, and […] the most important resource schools have is time.
"And then third is to design an incentive for teachers to want to do this. In our case, we aligned our Summer Institute with our promotion system, so there is a self-interest involved here. They must want to do this. By the same token, they understand that in order to become the teachers that we know they need to be—and that they know they need to be—this is also something that they want to do."
ISM will feature a new school each month to share stories of student, programmatic, and administrative success with nearly 30,000 private school administrators every month. If your school has a success story you'd like the world to hear, contact our e-letter editor today!
Additional ISM resources:
Research: Effective Teacher Professional Development: What the Literature Says
Research: Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement
ISM Monthly Update for School Heads Vol. 9 No. 7 Does Your Teacher Evaluation System Include Professional Development?
ISM Monthly Update for Division Heads Vol. 11 No. 9 When Professional Development Is Useful for Your Teachers
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 36 No. 3 ISM Success Predictor No. 17: Budgeting for Professional Development
I&P Vol. 34 No. 13 New Research: The Relationship Between Faculty Professional Development and Student Performance
I&P Vol. 28 No. 14 Scheduling Professional Development for Faculty and Staff
I&P Vol. 34 No. 10 Professional Development During Hard Economic Times
