PHILOSOPHY

Recognizing that the best teachers are also lifelong learners, Campbell Hall encourages faculty to engage in a broad variety of professional development activities, and the school provides significant budgetary support for that professional development.  Since faculty members have different schedules, both at school and outside of normal school hours, and especially since adult learners prefer to choose their own learning modalities as much as possible, Campbell Hall seeks to provide alternatives to "one size fits all" in-services.

At the same time, we are a distinctive school with a unique ethos and particular developmental needs.  Our professional development program seeks the specific outcome of helping faculty play to the school’s strengths and improve its areas of relative weakness.  To that end, we have identified a list of six required core competencies for all Campbell Hall faculty and staff:

  1. Episcopal Identity and Spiritual Development
  2. Diversity and Multicultural Literacy
  3. Different Learning Styles and Differentiated Instruction
  4. Instructional Technology
  5. Subject Area Expertise
  6. Health and Safety

Those competencies correspond to Campbell Hall's primary developmental initiatives as identified in our Strategic Plan.  Our overall professional development program for faculty and staff consists of both requirements and incentives to focus professional development - the primary incentive being that most expenses for approved professional development activities (other than full graduate school tuition) are covered fully by the school.

HISTORY

Campbell Hall has long been committed to teachers’ professional development in traditional ways, including sending many employees to conferences and workshops, subsidizing higher degree programs, and sponsoring faculty and staff in-services and trainings.
 
From 1990 to 2003, Headmaster Tom Clarke pioneered the CH Visiting Scholar program, inviting more than a dozen Scholars to spend roughly a week each on campus lecturing and dialoguing with faculty, parents, and students. The program was highly successful on many fronts, particularly in raising the awareness of many employees concerning Campbell Hall’s Episcopal identity. Canon Clarke’s vision convinced other CH leaders that it was in fact crucial to the school’s ongoing success to engage its faculty and staff regularly in dialogue about what might otherwise seem an elusive and ethereal subject: the school’s inclusive sense of community as derivative from its Episcopal heritage and as formative of the school’s particular approach to college preparatory education.
 
The Visiting Scholar program was discontinued in light of research that shows that adult learners prefer to have significant autonomy in structuring their own learning. After all, the trend in teaching children is to differentiate and individualize instruction as much as possible; surely the same principles apply even more forcefully to adults. Building on the work begun with the Visiting Scholars, the faculty currently may find increased benefit in programs that offer differentiation at both the divisional level and in subject areas. 
 
Beginning in 2004, Headmaster Julian Bull worked with the Assistant Head, Theresia Cunningham, and the central administrative team to rethink the school’s approach to professional development. Rather than asking the traditional questions underlying faculty development programs – what conference attendance will we encourage or allow, what speakers will we invite in, what post-graduate work will we subsidize? – we started focusing instead on the question, “What competencies do we consider central for teachers’, administrators’, and staff members’ ability to foster student success at Campbell Hall?” Building from the so-called “Super 8” from the Strategic Plan 2000, discussion led us to a proposed list of central competencies:
  • Subject-area expertise
  • Ability to differentiate instruction for a variety of learners
  • Multi-cultural literacy and sensitivity
  • Awareness of how to use instructional technology to enhance learning
  • Awareness of the profound role that Episcopal identity plays in CH’s distinctive approach to human development and educational philosophy
  • Safety and health: CPR, First Aid, Emergency preparedness, sexual harassment training, and the like
While that list could be longer, or could be organized differently, it does seem to represent those skills or content areas whose importance for teachers at CH persists over time. 
 
At some point the commonalities in the above list and the requirements for the California State Teaching Credential became striking. To be sure, securing the State credential involves jumping bureaucratic hurdles that some private school teachers would rather avoid. At the same time, we became aware that earning the California credential was a goal of many of our faculty, and also that there were political interests in the State that could make credentialing of private school teachers either mandatory or highly recommended.
 
As a first step in offering a more robust professional growth program that focused on the central competencies, Theresia Cunningham therefore began to explore the possibility of partnering with a regional graduate school of education to facilitate State credentialing for CH faculty. She soon chose California Lutheran University as the most accommodating and convenient graduate school of education, and began negotiating with CLU towards designing a program specifically tailored to those Campbell Hall teachers desirous of a State credential. We decided early on that Campbell Hall would pay 100% of the costs of the CLU credentialing program in order to increase faculty participation. That program began in the 2005-2006 school year under the leadership of Tom Phelps, by then  the Assistant Head and Theresia Cunningham, now retired from CH and acting as an administrative liaison between CH and CLU. As of the 2006-2007 school year, 30 faculty members were enrolled in the credentialing program with California Lutheran University by enrolling in classes in technology, health, and the U.S. Constitution. The significant enrollment of Campbell Hall teachers in CLU classes constitutes a good beginning for the credentialing program. 
 
 
Present Opportunities
 
At present we continue to send teachers to conferences, Louise Macatee continues to bring excellent speakers to campus through the Parent Ed program, and the secondary chapel program has brought some remarkable speakers and presentations to the secondary program. All-faculty meetings are limited to three times per year; we typically give reports related to the state of the school, planning issues, and important announcements, and perhaps offer safety and health training.
 
The CLU credentialing program was never intended to be a full answer to the question of core CH competencies. We will continue to offer the program for the foreseeable future, but must also acknowledge the many other available learning pathways. Furthermore, since Campbell Hall is already an excellent school, many of our teachers already demonstrate mastery in one or many of the core competencies. So the key question becomes, What kind of professional development program would deepen the core faculty competencies in the most reliable, systematic, and enjoyable way? Asking that question does not imply that adult learning has replaced student learning as CH’s primary mission. Instead, it seeks to address directly the simple fact that student learning suffers when teachers fall short in key competencies.
 
As the dialogue continues and more administrators, faculty, and staff enter into the conversation, a clearer outline of a new approach to professional development at Campbell Hall is emerging. These web pages represent our best current articulation of that approach, following conversations with Head’s Council, Elementary and Secondary Curriculum Councils, and a group of informal ad hoc committees on professional development opportunities that convened in 2006 and 2007.