Innovating Whole School PD as a Hub for Community Learning
Jan-Mark, Hannah and Aaron at Seoul Foreign School in South Korea.
There is a buzz at Seoul Foreign School (SFS) in South Korea about a new hub for learning. Called “The Gate”, this is an approach to professional development that encompasses the entire community and is an inclusive way of imagining lifelong learning.
Before Covid, Jan-Mark Seewald (Assistant Head of School - Academics) was responsible for professional development for K-12 teachers at SFS. He has worked at SFS for seven years and knows the school and community very well, and before Covid there was a lot of professional development happening at SFS. Almost every weekend there were workshops and events offered for teachers on campus, and teachers were also regularly attending professional learning workshops elsewhere and abroad.
“With Covid, of course, our professional development slowed right down,” reflects Jan-Mark. “Then, as we started back up, we wanted to do something more deliberate and set it up in a way that supports the entire community.”
Jan-Mark, Aaron (co-founder of Inspire Citizens) and Hannah Kim (Jan Mark’s executive assistant) worked together to create a dream that became “The Gate”.
“Our mission statement ends with ‘dedicated to the service of others’, and we started asking about what that meant,” says Jan-Mark. “Obviously we’re dedicated to serving our students in the classroom, but what about serving education in Korea and smaller schools here? How could we expand our approach so we could serve as a hub for PD in the region? Aaron started asking about parent experiences, and Hannah asked about non-academic faculty and staff as we talked through our ideas, and we all got pretty excited about what ‘The Gate’ might look like.”
Inspire Citizens has been working with SFS for several years and Aaron has a deep understanding of SFS approaches, programs and goals.
“Aaron has spent years working with teachers and leaders at SFS about aligning our curricular work with our mission statement and Empathy to Impact,” says Jan-Mark. “We are long-term partners with Inspire Citizens and we’ve had a unique situation because Aaron has been based in Seoul and has spent significant time each year working with our teams.”
From the trio’s initial design sessions, five PD areas of focus for The Gate have emerged:
PD for educators
PD for non-teaching staff
Student learning experiences and experiential learning
Parent experiences
Community partners and community engagement
This year, The Gate has launched with offerings for teachers, parents, students and community partners. Options for non-teaching staff are being explored and created, with Hannah and Jan-Mark surveying staff to understand their needs and interests.
Parents were invited to attend workshops to mimic real learning tasks in DP (International Baccalaureate Diploma Program) Visual Art and DP Design.
“Many of our parents have questions about the IB Diploma Program and, rather than simply presenting more information to them, we wanted to offer a hands-on experience to show them what the DP is like,” says Hannah. “We piloted this last year with SFS faculty who had children coming into the DP and those faculty were from a range of departments including admissions and alumni relations. It worked well with our faculty and it was really successful with our parents.”
For the DP Visual Art workshop, parents were asked to curate an art gallery, like students do for their DP Visual Art Exhibition. Parents were placed in groups and each group had a styrofoam model and miniature works of art to choose and group together. They had to think about the theme and design of their gallery, as well as how things would be displayed, and they were given formative feedback by the DP visual art teacher during the workshop.
“This really helped parents understand the type of learning happening in the DP,” says Jan-Mark. “We got comments from parents about how ‘real-life’ this experience was, and how much they enjoyed it. The same thing happened with our DP Design task. They were engaged in prototyping a design for a potato peeler that would function well for someone with arthritis, and they created their prototypes out of modeling clay.”
Parents with children in varied sections at SFS attended the workshops to get a feel for the spirit of the IB approach to teaching and learning.
Next Jan-Mark and Hannah hope to design sessions for parents related to the IB Middle Years Program and Primary Years Program, as well.
The Gate has also supported experiential learning for the high school Discovery Week in May, and a student leadership conference is planned for the new year.
“The Gate is a thought space right now, and we use different facilities on campus to support what we’re designing,” says Jan-Mark. “Down the road we may need to establish a Gate office, and we really want this to feel like it’s connected in a real way to life in the school.”
In October, Hannah, Jan-Mark and Aaron presented at the EARCOS Leadership Conference, and they were excited to share what they’ve developed with peers in the region.
“It was the first time I had done anything like that,” says Hannah. “We received really positive feedback from the participants in our session, and it validated our vision for The Gate.”
Jan-Mark agrees: “A woman who heads a leadership group in India came to us after the workshop to compliment us, and she said it felt like we were really doing something innovative; this was a proud moment, and we’ve received positive feedback from our own teachers and parents, too. It’s really exciting.”
Aaron is excited about the innovative service at the heart of The Gate’s purpose.
“The gate is meant to take the resources that we have as international schools and try to create more opportunities for professional learning for all,” says Aaron. “The gate’s tagline is ‘Learning for all’ and, by using the school’s existing resources, we are trying to provide opportunities for staff who currently do not have access to PD budgets as a means of approaching greater equity. We are trying to provide opportunities for educators from schools without PD budgets, and we are hosting events for educators and students whose schools may not have the same resources or opportunities. We are trying to build community and positively impact education in Korea through taking the resources of tier 1 international schools and intentionally creating ‘learning for all’.”
This is a wonderful model for international schools everywhere. The Gate represents an opportunity for sharing, for community growth, for redistribution of resources, and it sets a precedent for international schools around the world to see how they could truly serve their communities by taking what they already have, and aim it outward.
In these ways, The Gate is the embodiment of the Inspire Citizens’ Empathy to Impact model at an institutional level, and it can serve as a call to action to other well-resourced schools around the world to employ a similar approach.
