THE TEACHERS ISSUE 07
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The defining outcome of the Teaching Boys Curriculum will be a teacher’ s success in the generation and continued improvement of theory and practice in advancing teaching and learning efficacy. It will require effortful study, design, implementation, data collection, and a culminating process of analysis and assessment. Our ultimate aim is to create a community of inquiry in which all questions by all teachers reflect the contexts of the disciplines, age groups, and particular teaching challenges they are encountering— and it’ s all intentionally coordinated.
YEAR THREE: INTEGRATING REFLECTIVE PRACTICE We are now in our third year of the rollout, and we are continuing to further embed reflective practice within Saint David’ s professional teaching culture by integrating the principles and practices across all pathways in our professional development program. We continue to actively apply faculty feedback to refine our planning and implementation, as well as evaluate outcomes to gauge individual teacher growth.
Campbell is continuing to work with our faculty, incorporating reflective practice into the mentoring program for teachers new to the school. We also launched a new effort to incorporate regular, informal reflective writing into our mentoring( onboarding) and supervision and evaluation programs. Both mentees and milestone( major performance reviews that occur every five years) candidates are now being asked to write biannual process letters to memorialize their thinking and document efforts toward their professional goals. The letters help these candidates recognize and celebrate their accomplishments, clarify their goals, and identify ways the school could support their continued growth within the framework of their milestone review.
Check out Saint David’ s“ Framework for Best Practices in Teaching and Learning for Boys” at saintdavids. org / downloads / Framework. pdf
Our focus is shifting from teachers as relational managers to examining ways we can empower boys to take more accountability for their academic effort, conduct, and relationships with adults. Reichert is working with our social-emotional health program chair, our advisory coordinator, and upper school advisers to explore how we can leverage the advisory program to promote accountability among our sixth, seventh, and eighth grade boys.
As a part of TBI, our goal is to adopt an approach to classroom observation that promotes reflective practice and empowers teachers to take greater initiative in defining their own professional growth. Following the successful adoption of Walkthrough Wednesdays, we introduced a process called Descriptive Observations— in which teachers make factual observations of other teachers without judgment— to complement and deepen the experiences. Descriptive observations emphasize a debriefing process that fosters a sense of agency, assumes competency, and creates a meaningfully productive relationship between the teacher and the observer as thinking partners. Combined with the walkthroughs, they have helped advance the goals of TBI.
WHAT’ S AHEAD Just as the mission of Saint David’ s has guided teacher practice across the school’ s four pillars— academic, athletic, artistic, and spiritual— for generations, the guiding principles of the Teaching Boys Initiative will need to define how the various branches of our professional development program will enhance teachers’ knowledge, skills, habits, and dispositions in service of the school’ s mission.
In creating TBI, we established its guiding principles: continued professional development, deliberate reflective practice, teacher as learner, and growth monitoring and evaluation. Our work around this major strategic objective has revitalized our professional community, injecting time, resources, and institutional commitment into the professional development of our most valued resource: our teachers. Currently, 80 % of our faculty are engaged in reflective practice through participation in our mentoring, supervision and evaluation, and research programs. The number of faculty applying for research grants this year has grown from the initial six to 44.
Further, we’ ve collected 100 process letters from faculty demonstrating an increased depth of reflection grounded in research and depicting the story of collaborative inquiry. By aligning our professional learning model with proven classroom strategies and best practices in the field supported by evidence, and by leveraging the collective efficacy of our teachers, we are empowering our faculty not only to engage in meaningful professional growth but also to contribute to the continuous refinement of our best practices framework.
The Teaching Boys Initiative prioritizes faculty compensation and professional development through researchdriven, integrated programming that fosters collaboration and reflective practice throughout an educator’ s career. We are energized by this work and excited about where it will take us.
David O’ Halloran, Ph. D., is head of Saint David’ s School in New York City.
84 | Summer 2025 Independent School | nais. org