Insight: Fostering a Learning Culture

By Karen Mills, Faculty Development Coordinator & MS English Teacher

I have a confession: I love to learn. Teach me a new word and it will run through my head until I can successfully use it in conversation. Introduce me to the importance of, say, bile in the body (thank you, Ms. Henningsen) and I will gleefully explain it to my kids during dinner. Tell me a joke I haven’t heard and … well, I won’t tell it to others because I’m a terrible joke-teller but I will enjoy the momentary buzz of the “new.” Like many of my EPS colleagues, I feel drawn to teaching because of that buzz, spark, zing that transforms me when my mind expands with new ways to think about the world.

In our EPS community, learning is not only reserved for students. My role as Faculty Development Coordinator, in fact, was created to foster and facilitate experiences, opportunities, and programs that help fellow teachers expand their knowledge. We all want to grow as educators so we can best serve our students’ needs, which means keeping up with trends in instruction, content areas, adolescent development, EICL, and technological advances, to name just a few. We reserve full days on campus to delve into specific topics, arrange morning and after-school meetings, attend conferences, read articles and books, and reflect regularly on our practices during informal gatherings like lunch in the LPC. The adults in our community learn continuously, and it is a privilege to support their endeavors.

New to our faculty development offerings this year, Jamie Andrus, Jonathan Briggs, and I are each leading a group of colleagues in a pilot called EPStudy Groups. Research shows that collective learning can be more transformational and impactful than learning in isolation, hence the design of this pilot. Each group studies a different topic (this year’s topics are autism, AI, and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), respectively) with the goals of deepening our skills and content knowledge, engaging in shared dialogue, and supporting one another as we develop. EPStudy Groups supplement other faculty development efforts on campus, such as the Professional Development Program, the Resident Teacher Program, and our regular discipline and divisional meetings.

Learning at EPS is a collective effort—we all teach and we all learn. It takes intention, effort, and time to craft useful learning opportunities, and we are dedicated to such development for the benefit of our school community.