By Mr. Paul McDaniel, Head of Primary School
International schools that span multiple educational phases face a unique challenge: how do you foster meaningful professional growth when your faculty teaches everything from early years to advanced secondary students? Each division operates within its own curricular universe, yet all educators share a common purpose tied to the school's core mission.
The Challenge of Unity in Diversity
In schools serving students from Pre-Nursery through Year 13, teachers often work in parallel tracks rather than interconnected pathways. Primary educators focus on foundational skills, while secondary colleagues prepare students for university and beyond. Different curricula, distinct pedagogical methods, and separate professional communities can create invisible walls within a single institution.
The question becomes: how can professional development serve as a bridge rather than another isolated activity?
A New Approach: Learning in Threes
One international school explored an innovative solution by organizing educators into small collaborative groups of three, each working toward a common professional goal. This "learning trios" model emerged from recognizing two critical gaps in traditional professional development approaches.
First, whole-staff training sessions, while valuable for sharing broad initiatives, often lack the specificity that teachers need to address their individual classroom challenges. Second, purely individualized performance goals, though personalized, can leave educators feeling siloed and disconnected from their colleagues' expertise and experiences.
The trio structure aimed to split the difference: small enough for genuine collaboration, focused enough to address specific needs, yet diverse enough to spark fresh perspectives.
Building Groups Around Shared Needs
The formation process began during September performance reviews, when teachers across both primary and secondary divisions identified their professional growth priorities. School leaders then analyzed these goals to discover natural alignments and common threads.
Some connections proved remarkably specific. Multiple educators, for instance, expressed interest in better supporting English language learners or maximizing the potential of school-wide digital tools. These shared interests became the foundation for trio formation.
Crucially, the school intentionally mixed educators from different key stages. This cross-phase composition reflected an important reality: student learning doesn't restart at each transition point. A child's educational journey flows continuously, and the adults supporting that journey benefit from understanding the full arc of development.
A Framework Familiar to Students, Applied to Teachers
To provide structure without rigidity, the school adapted a learning framework typically used with students—the International Curriculum Association's Process to Facilitate Learning. Teachers would experience the same learning journey they facilitate in their classrooms.
This approach began with entry points where trios identified their focus, moved through knowledge gathering and application, incorporated ongoing reflection, and culminated in a public sharing of discoveries. By using student-centered learning principles with adults, the school sent a powerful message: professional growth follows the same patterns as student growth.
This parallel served dual purposes. It normalized continuous learning as an inherent aspect of professional identity rather than a performance management checkbox. It also demonstrated that effective teaching practices apply across contexts, whether the learner is seven or forty-seven.
How Trios Functioned
Each group held an initial session to establish their collective goals, agree on collaboration norms, and determine their meeting rhythm over the subsequent seven weeks. Rather than imposing a uniform structure, the school encouraged trios to document their discussions through brief notes—just enough to maintain continuity and mutual accountability without becoming burdensome.
This autonomy proved essential. Groups could pursue their questions through whatever methods made sense: reading research, trying new classroom strategies, observing each other's practice, or consulting external resources. The flexibility honored teacher agency, though it also meant that groups progressed at varying paces and reached different depths of exploration.
The process concluded with a learning exhibition where each trio chose its own format for sharing insights. Some created presentations, others produced videos or posters, and several facilitated interactive discussions. This celebration of collective learning positioned professional development as community knowledge rather than private accomplishment.
Measuring Impact
Feedback and participation data painted an encouraging picture for this inaugural effort:
- Approximately 75% of trios convened between three and five times during the seven-week period
- Two-thirds of staff engaged with three to four different exhibition displays, showing strong interest in colleagues' work
- Over half of survey respondents reported that the trio experience positively influenced their professional growth that term
For a completely new initiative implemented across a busy school term, these results suggested genuine traction. The exhibition component particularly seemed to generate both accountability and curiosity, extending learning beyond individual groups.
What Worked Well
Several strengths emerged clearly. Because focus areas originated from teachers' own development goals, the work felt immediately relevant rather than abstractly imposed. When trio members were well-matched around specific objectives, the cross-phase conversations yielded valuable new insights and challenged assumptions about practice.
The balance of documentation and sharing created sufficient structure to maintain momentum without becoming onerous. Perhaps most significantly, applying student learning processes to adult professional growth reinforced a fundamental school culture: everyone here is a learner, regardless of title or experience level.
Areas for Growth
Honest reflection also revealed opportunities for improvement. When trios formed around broader themes—an inevitable result of diverse professional development goals—groups sometimes struggled to maintain focus and depth. Several educators noted that additional research context about collaborative professional learning models would have strengthened their understanding and commitment from the start.
While teachers appreciated autonomy, some suggested that clearer expectations around minimum meeting frequency might have ensured more consistent engagement across all groups. And as in most schools, competing demands on teacher time limited how deeply certain trios could explore their chosen areas.
Moving Forward
This experience demonstrated that small collaborative groups can effectively support professional learning in through schools, particularly when several conditions align: clear connection to individual growth goals, solid grounding in educational research, and structured expectations from leadership.
The student learning framework proved surprisingly effective for adult development, creating coherence between what teachers experience and what they facilitate. Future iterations could strengthen the model by refining how trios are composed to ensure tight thematic alignment, providing research foundations upfront, and making more explicit connections between teacher learning and student outcomes.
Despite implementation challenges, the trio approach successfully brought educators from across the school together around common purposes. It encouraged collaborative reflection and professional curiosity while distributing responsibility for learning across the community.
The underlying insight remains powerful: just as student learning thrives when it's purposeful, collaborative, and reflective, so too does professional development. When teachers experience the conditions, they strive to create for their students, everyone grows.
