Last year, Dr. Campbell, led a group of reflective practitioners, embarking on a Teaching Boys Curriculum project. The five areas that the teachers worked on throughout the year included The Self Directed Learner, The Confident Learner, The Effective Efficient Classroom, Learning as Play, and Students Learning From Students.
This year, Dr. Campbell continues his ongoing professional development work with our faculty, incorporating reflective practice into our mentoring program for teachers new to the school. The goal of Saint David’s collaboration with Dr. Campbell is to jointly create a Teaching Boys Curriculum over the next 12 months, and ultimately to create a course of study in partnership with a leading university. This would provide an opportunity for Saint David’s teachers to teach colleagues from Saint David’s and elsewhere at the college level.
As the 2023-24 school year drew to a close, Saint David’s Magazine sat down with Dr. Campbell:
How did your relationship with Saint David’s come to be?
I was actually connected to David O’Halloran by a colleague of mine. When we met in February last year, he talked to me about his vision, and asked me to write a proposal for a program that would position Saint David’s as an educational center.
We decided to work with a subset of teachers engaged in a parallel to that graduate program, but scaled back a bit, where each of the teachers was involved in a teacher research project in order to improve their practice in a given area of interest.
Can you tell us a bit about the faculty peer study groups and why they are so valuable to the Professional Development Model?
The work of changing how we teach requires deliberate practice in a process of continual reflection, and that is supported most effectively when one is working with peers who you can talk with and bounce ideas off of and with whom you evaluate your own teaching as you move ahead.
Would you say there is an ultimate goal of the study groups?
The ultimate goal is that I disappear. And you’ve got a self- sustaining community of teachers who are committed to continual professional development, and have the tools and skills to carry forward on their own as leaders from the classroom.
In terms of reflective practice, what have you observed here at Saint David’s, about Saint David’s teachers?
There’s no question that the teachers I’ve worked with are very interested in improving what they do. I would say all of us, as teachers, consider it a lifelong process of continual growth. There’s always that one student we could reach more effectively or the question of how much more learning can be achieved in the course of a day, or a week, or a school year. The teachers I’ve been working with are very interested in asking themselves questions about what they could be doing better.
When we think about the PD work as a whole, what are the benefits that students will experience, the endgame being to enhance what they are learning?
The students may or may not totally appreciate what’s happening, but there are two things we want to see. One is that what students are capable of doing – the kinds of knowledge and skills that are demonstrated in a certain task that are assigned by a teacher – continues to develop and grow.
What we would normally expect, let’s say, of an eighth grader may be something now that a fifth grader is able to do. I think one thing we’re doing is pushing the envelope of what’s possible. And I think for students themselves, they may find all of a sudden that they are running to class, not wanting to miss what’s going on because they’re deeply engaged in the forms of inquiry that define a particular domain, whether it’s music, science, math, history, whatever it may be.