Educare: Drawing Out the Best of Our Boys and Teachers
The Teaching Boys Initiative ™
By Ric Campbell
T his is a short version of part of a longer story about how Saint David’ s continually evolves and innovates to meet its stated mission:
The mission of Saint David’ s School is to educate boys to fulfill their potential through rigorous academic pursuit, deliberate moral introspection, and critical analysis of ideas and issues. 1
To educate means literally“ to lead out” but might better be understood as leading towards and, in the case of Saint David’ s School, this means leading students towards becoming“ good men.” As parents, we know this is not an easy task, and we count on the school to do what it can uniquely do. Teachers make this happen, spending their days interacting with students in classrooms and their evenings and weekends planning for these interactions and responding to students’ work with meaningful feedback that leads towards our shared and common goals.
The quality of that teaching is critical. To this end, the leadership and teachers of Saint David’ s have advanced a plan for professional development( PD) directed towards continuous improvement. This plan, the Teaching Boys Initiative( TBI), continues to evolve in response to the needs of teachers and, most importantly, in pursuit of an ideal in which teaching supports each and every student in achieving their full potential.
When I joined Saint David’ s faculty as a consultant, I was asked to build on the TBI program, adding value to an existing foundation of learning expectations for teachers. I have spent the last 20 years focused on teacher education after spending 20 years practicing my own teaching in elementary through high school classrooms. When I was asked to design and then lead a graduate teacher education program at Bard College, I spent a year thinking about what had come to matter to me in my professional learning and studied teacher education models to figure out how we could build a better approach. During this year, a white paper published by the Carnegie Corporation defined the deeply challenging work of teaching as a clinical profession, comparable to doctors, but with lasting impact on the future lives of children shaped by school culture.
Assess, diagnose, prescribe and adjust practice to reflect new research, training and experience— that’ s what a modern clinical professional does. 2
Teachers are not typically educated to do this work; those who end up doing this well have taught themselves, often without the benefit of the many decades of research in fields like psychology( cognitive, developmental, personality), sociology, and anthropology that define the“ learning sciences.” Though this research offers valuable knowledge about how people learn, it is knowledge that remains untested in the typical classroom context. For this knowledge to be useful, it must be tested and adapted to the daily work of creating productive classroom learning cultures. This is the work that falls to teachers, carrying out the research that will address student learning needs and achieve our best hopes for every learner.
The gap between aspiration and teaching is a real and frustrating one. The gap can only be closed by adopting a research and development approach to one’ s own teaching, whether alone or in a group of cooperating teachers. 3
During the 2023-2024 school year, we introduced a pilot program called Reflective Practice. Fourteen teachers signed on to engage in inquiry: asking questions about their own teaching, looking at the ways students engaged with the curriculum and their fellow learners,
1
https:// www. saintdavids. org / about-us / mission-about-us /
2
Hinds, M. D.( 2002). Carnegie Challenge. Teaching as a Clinical Profession: A New Challenge for Education. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.
3
Stenhouse, L.( 1975) An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London: Heinemann.
16 • Saint David’ s Magazine