The Shipley Magazine

Teaching The Teachers

Strategic Plan Update - Goal #1: Educational Excellence

How is Shipley strengthening students’ ability to engage and lead in an increasingly complex and interconnected world?

The five strategies supporting educational excellence are aimed at equipping students with the skills they will need to thrive and succeed in an increasingly global world, where empathy, critical thinking, and social competencies are essential. In this feature from the Summer/Fall 2023 issue of the Shipley Magazine, we explore how we are addressing these goals through Professional Development for teachers.

Teaching The Teachers

Goals Addressed: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5

“Those who teach, must never cease to learn”  ~John Cotton Dana

Teaching colleagues engage in weekly professional development within the school day. Through professional learning communities (PLCs), book clubs, structured curricular conversations, and divisional DEI and well-being workshops led by colleagues and outside professionals, teachers are able to continue to learn and grow as educators. Here are a few popular sessions that were led by Shipley colleagues in the 2022-2023 school year.

A Mind for Numbers

Ten Middle and Upper School teachers from the math, science, English, and library departments joined Upper School math teacher Dr. Lisa Chirlian in reading the user-friendly book, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science, which offers practical advice for helping students develop strategies to improve their problem-solving abilities while also developing their self-confidence in math, science, and beyond.

Developing a Harkness Practice

Learning by doing is how 15 Upper and Middle School teachers of several disciplines spent four professional development sessions this spring. The sessions were led by Upper School history teachers Chris Simpson and Zackaria Gaines, who shared their passion and excitement for the different ways Harkness can be utilized. Teachers read, participated, analyzed, and applied it in this true teachers-teaching-teachers PLC.

The ABCDEs of Emotional Agility 

Emotional agility is the ability to notice and savor the pleasant, and learn and grow from unpleasant experiences. It is one of seven domains in Shipley’s Framework for Well-Being. Nick Holton led three workshops to help teachers examine how beliefs about adversity and the consequences of those beliefs may show up in their experiences, equipping them to anticipate the same in their students and help them navigate through.
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The Shipley School is a private, coeducational day school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade students, located in Bryn Mawr, PA. Through our commitment to educational excellence, we develop within each student a love of learning and a desire for compassionate participation in the world.