Turning PD into Purpose:
Redeeming Professional Learning through Mission
At the beginning of the school year, teachers arrive with enthusiasm and excitement, only to enter the first faculty meeting with a touch of cynicism. For me, the “opening faculty meeting bingo” always made an appearance. I’d mentally check off squares when I heard “Project-based learning” or “Enrollment is up,” then exchange a knowing glance with a colleague. If you look at teacher social media accounts or educational blog posts or just remember the frustrating faculty meetings that you attended as a teacher, you quickly find tension surrounding professional development (PD) and professional learning communities (PLCs). Teachers like to learn and collaborate, but a gap exists between how they want to do it and how schools often set it up. As administrators, we see how quickly PLCs can drift without the appropriate guardrails.
This year, Mount Paran Christian School (MPCS) has had a goal to turn our teachers’ narrative on PD and PLCs. We set this goal not to feel better about ourselves but from a desire to honor God and our faculty by cultivating and leveraging their talent and passion for Christ-centered education. At the foundation of this initiative stood the desire to faithfully serve our students. When teachers effectively collaborate and implementlearning into practice, the students benefit.
Throughout this process, we learned some lessons as we have observed our teachers respond well and taken to heart the data from their feedback of what to continue and where we still need improvement. While none of these are groundbreaking, I pray that they provide helpful reminders of how we can steward our teachers time and talents well.
Lesson 1: Play with Your Structure
Every structural choice communicates priorities. The educational world encourages teachers to start with the ideal set-ups for their classrooms then figure out the logistics, but we, as administrators, can fall into the temptation to prioritize logistics first, inadvertently limiting effectiveness.
At MPCS, we have forty-five minutes every Wednesday morning for PD and PLCs. Historically, we rotated between different groups, whether departments, peer groups, or book clubs. This fall, we shifted to division-specific PDs and PLCs, encouraging division heads to experiment with what works best. In addition, we have begun to view PD through a course lens, having the same “course” for multiple weeks in a row until completion.
The result has been teachers thanking us for more curated, cohesive PD and collaborative work for PLCs. One teacher wrote in the feedback survey that now the mornings “directly benefit (me) in my classroom.”
Lesson 2: Clarify the Vision
Every school can create a multipage list of what pedagogical or partnership practices could be improved. When we try to tackle several of them simultaneously, we end up with vision splatter, where competing goals discourage teachers who feel pulled in too many directions at once. Plus, new initiatives can often feel like the flavor of the year.
In our middle school, we began the semester with a reminder of the overarching, year-over-year vision and then focused on one major goal. We then linked every meeting and work session to the vision and that goal. With that focus, our teachers found guidance and freedom when they broke out into smaller PLCs. Our science teachers developed common language across grades, and our Bible teachers codified best practices for their newly implemented single-gender classes. Both departments aligned their work with the semester’s focal point, and teachers appreciated the clarity of direction.
For our schoolwide biblical immersion focus, we have intentionally connected this work to the centrality our school’s mission and clarified that this is a multiyear initiative, helping our teachers understand that it is not a short-term emphasis but a sustained commitment.
Lesson 3: Fight the Logistics Urge
Not everyone reads my emails, at least not to the end! It’s frustrating, but less so than sitting through a meeting that could have been an email.
Our lower school uses an “in the loop” weekly email for logistics to limit email clutter and non-classroom actionable meetings. Wednesday mornings shifted to collaborative work time, with a focus on grade-level and vertical alignment needs that both admin and faculty had identified. Teachers commented about the tangible increase in alignment and time, an ever present, justified cry of teachers, as a result. I record videos to goover logistics and have even given out awards for those who catch the easter eggs in them. One staff member once thanked me that they could now get the information as they brush their teeth in the morning.
Lesson 4: Truly Tap into their Expertise
I once had a teacher say to me, “It feels like admin makes the decisions then fills in a teacher and has them talk to the faculty to make it feel like there is buy-in.” Oof. That comment stuck with me because it reflects a truth many teachers quietly feel.
In contrast to that unfortunately all too often true claim, our preschool head approached one of her most talented teachers over the summer and asked her to run all the PD in the fall. The results have been significant, with increased teacher engagement and stronger pedagogical alignment. With a colleague leading the work, preschool teachers consistently highlighted their appreciation for meaningful collaboration and the practical,immediately implementable strategies.
Lesson 5: Remember the Mission
It is easy to either assume teachers will naturally make links to the school’s mission or to get caught up in the “practical” work of education. However, we must intentionally keep the mission at the forefront of the conversation.
As we trained teacher facilitators to lead their PLCs for our schoolwide second semester focus on biblical immersion, the familiar concerns about schoolwide PD arose. Our Director of the Arts, who was leading the training, reminded the facilitators that they could always go back to this mission-central question: “Do we want students to grow in their biblical worldview through our classes?” As our PLCs across campus have beendeveloping biblical truth claims for their subject and/or grade, admin has stayed out of every meeting, and facilitators have still kept the mission tangible through this simple question.
Conclusion
Our schools stand on the foundation of Christ-centered missions and passionate, servant-hearted faculty. We should always desire to use professional development and professional learning communities to steward faculty gifts in service to students. As we ponder the most effective ways to steward these gifts, I leave us with a comment that summarizes the most consistent feedback from the teacher survey: Please continue to differentiate for us as you ask us to differentiate for our students.
Peter Hill serves Mount Paran Christian School through his roles as Head of Middle School and Chair of the Academic Council. Previous to Mount Paran, he taught and coached at a New England boarding school and an all-boys Catholic school. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and earned his M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College.