A fresh coating of snow and ice, the steady hum of snowmaking at the Proctor Ski Area, and woodsmoke hanging in the Blackwater River Valley signal the arrival of the winter term. Whether we have been teaching for several years or several decades, the transition to a new trimester (and the periods in between terms) allows for a natural pause for reflection. As educators, we model the lifelong learning that we hope to instill in our students, and, like our students, we are always learning and growing.
On Monday, we gathered for a day of professional development. Sometimes professional development means welcoming outside experts. Often, and perhaps even more effectively, we turn to members of our own community. Just as we ask our students to learn by doing, to immerse themselves in their courses, and to engage in civil and productive discourse with their peers, our professional development exemplifies these same principles. Through an all-faculty historical simulation, we experienced firsthand the power of active learning and stepping into different perspectives and demonstrating our understanding of 5th Century BCE Athens (both prior knowledge and new information from the simulation gamebook). In our first Professional Learning Community discussion, we practiced the kind of deep listening, collaborative brainstorming, and critical thinking we hope to foster in our classroom discussions.
In the morning, Erik Cole-Johnson, Laurel Shinerock, and Jill Lowman kicked off our Professional Learning Community (PLC) initiative with an exploration of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation. Drawing from Haidt's framework of four foundational harms – social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction and habit formation – the team helped frame our understanding of the challenges facing today's adolescents around smartphone and social media use, who, on average, spend seven hours daily on screens and increasingly report being online "almost all of the time." Adolescence represents a critical period of neural development, where both online and offline experiences profoundly shape cognitive and emotional growth.
Rather than taking an alarmist stance, the presenters emphasized how Proctor's relational educational model positions us to address these challenges thoughtfully. The discussion incorporated feedback from many voices as we discussed leveraging our existing structures - freshman and sophomore seminars, advisory groups, and community days - and recognized that we must move beyond simple policy changes to address what Haidt terms the "experience blocker" effect of smartphones. Key to our approach will continue to be partnering with and empowering student leaders to address what Sherry Turkle calls being "forever elsewhere," building on their work this past fall.
Professional Learning Communities at Proctor aim to tackle complex educational challenges through focused faculty collaboration. The Anxious Generation PLC will continue meeting throughout the year as we seek to develop recommendations that seek to balance the reality of technology's role in our students' lives – and prepare them for a digital future and life after high school – with Proctor's commitment to authentic human connection.
The afternoon featured an immersive historical simulation, part of the Reacting to the Past curriculum, led by Marc Flaherty alongside his former History Professor at Colby-Sawyer College, Eric Boyer. This approach embodies key principles of effective learning: it requires active engagement rather than passive listening, creates an emotional investment in the material, and demands both critical thinking and in-depth research. As Professor Boyer highlighted as he reflected on his own teaching, "No student ever remembered my thrilling lecture about parliamentary systems. What they remembered was, 'Do you remember that time that I was North Korea, and you were South Korea?'" This insight led him to reimagine simulations as central to learning, or "no longer the dessert at the end of the meal” but the meal itself.
Faculty receive detailed character sheets outlining their historical figure's background, objectives, and potential strategies. Students conducting a full simulation would also engage with primary sources and period documents to understand their character's worldviews and motivations. For example, a recent Colby-Sawyer student's week-long existential crisis over whether her Confucian purist character should accept a politically opportune bribe exemplifies how deeply students can engage in these exercises. By placing students in roles where they must actively strategize, negotiate, and make consequential decisions, simulations allow students to practice historical thinking (and other critical thinking and presentation skills) and draw connections between the past and present. The competitive element - with different factions working toward opposing objectives - provides immediate purpose to learning (and fun!).
Looking ahead, several critical areas have emerged as potential areas for future PLC focus: artificial intelligence in education, social media's impact on student culture, universal design for learning, and maximizing our learning management software capabilities. This recent “PD Day” reinforced that professional development at Proctor works best when combining external expertise with internal wisdom, theory with practice, and individual reflection with collaborative dialogue.
Read more about Professional Development at Proctor HERE!
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