Supporting Professional Development from Within
Students aren’t the only ones who are learning and growing each year at Burke’s. The teachers also stretch and improve their skills through the Burke’s Professional Growth System (PGS), a program for self-reflection and constructive evaluation. PGS is essential not only for the faculty’s personal growth, but also for supporting major school priorities, including 21st Century teaching and learning, and social-emotional learning (including mindfulness). It is a program that was thoughtfully designed jointly by the faculty and academic staff and is continually monitored and updated. PGS includes annual-goal setting, a documented classroom observation process, a written and verbal feedback cycle and a collaborative focus.
PGS is also facilitated by Burke’s use of Folio, a web-based tool for documenting conversations about personal growth. The school adopted Folio in 2013 for its power to streamline the otherwise unwieldy documentation of the professional growth process and for its emphasis on regular conversations as essential to both evaluation and ongoing growth. In choosing to use Folio, Burke’s became a member of the Folio Collaborative, a group of independent schools all utilizing and contributing to the development of the tool and best practices for its use.
In the summer of 2015, Rebekah Wolman, Burke’s Director of the Upper School, attended the Folio Collaborative Summer Institute and returned energized. “I [came] back from the Summer Institute with so much to share — some of it directly related to our use of Folio, but so much more as well, from new perspectives on goal-setting, feedback, and coaching to big ideas about our purpose as a school.” Her experience at the Institute spurred the review of a key component of PGS. This year, a committee with both faculty and administrative staff members has focused on updating the “Expectations for Teaching and Participation in the Professional Community” document to bring it into better alignment with Burke’s current institutional goals and make it a more impactful tool for professional growth. This review has been tackling multiple questions, including:
- Does the document reflect where we are today?
- How useful is it in teachers’ work and growth?
- How might it become more relevant and useful?
- How can we link the goal-setting process more deeply, strongly, to the expectations?
- What if we didn’t have a document like this? How would people know what we were looking for in their teaching? How else might people set goals/set benchmarks for their work?