By Megan Mallory

Everybody deserves a coach. Athletes have them, actors have them. Why not teachers?  

Coaching is all about helping someone else and fostering their growth. That’s the philosophy of Steve Barkley, an educational consultant based in Switzerland, and it’s one that Mercersburg Academy has embraced as the school embarks on two new programs to support teachers in the classroom: peer coaching and instructional coaching. Both programs are in their second year, and both build upon Mercersburg’s long history of supporting teachers in their goal to become better at their craft.   

“In the 24 years that I’ve been doing this, we’ve learned a lot about how the brain works, how learning happens, and how memory works,” said Julia Stojak Maurer ’90, P ’18, ’20, ’22, ’23, ’28, associate head of school for school life. “As that research has become available, we’ve been able to leverage that to bring it to our teachers and impact our students in the classroom. So it’s pretty simple: it’s all for the benefit of our students.”

Mercersburg has teamed up with Barkley to launch the peer coaching program where Mercersburg teachers partner with one another to offer guidance and feedback. Each pair spends time visiting one another’s classes and helping each other focus on any particular areas they identify as opportunities for growth. “With peer coaching, [teachers have] been trained on what questions to ask to get you really thinking about how they can be most useful to you,” said Jennifer Miller Smith ’97, P ’23, ’24, dean of academics and director of Mercersburg’s coaching program. 

“So it’s all about, what does the teacher whose class the coach is coming into, what do they most want to get out of that experience? It becomes about that teacher, instead of about the observer. It’s all about your own professional growth and goals, and it’s reciprocal.”

Barkley connects with these teaching pairs periodically throughout the school year to help them make the most of their mentoring time. In the first year of the peer coaching program during the 2023-2024 academic year, 22 Mercersburg teaching faculty members signed up to coach one another. This year, 16 additional teaching faculty have joined the program.

“I hear from a lot of teachers that the best professional development is to visit each other’s classes and to see what other people are doing–they always come away with new, good ideas,” Smith said.

While peer coaching is very much reciprocal, instructional coaching is more guided toward one teacher serving as a mentor and offering advice to another teacher. All new teachers at Mercersburg are assigned an instructional coach, and veteran teachers may also request one. Mercersburg has always had department mentors, but “we wanted to make that support for new teachers more robust,” said Smith, “and so we assigned each of them an instructional coach who also has that really detailed list [of areas to focus on] to make sure you’re going over all these things that are specific to Mercersburg, and then also providing the peer coaching types of conversations but not in the same reciprocal way.” New teachers don’t offer feedback to their instructional coach, for instance, but the conversations and support for the new teacher are still very similar to peer coaching. It’s teacher led in terms of what the new teacher is hoping to get out of it.

The preparation for instructional coaches is also different from the preparation for peer coaches. Mercersburg currently has four trained instructional coaches–Smith; Amy Kelley P ’28, who is head of the mathematics department; Kristen Pixler P ’26, ’28, who is head of the arts department; and Heather Prescott, language faculty. Each coach completed a year of training through a certificate program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

Smith described the coursework and experience as quite intense. “The way we ended up structuring it was that all four of us together would meet as a group all of last year, and we still do this year, but we’d also talk about our coursework, and we would work together on it, and so we were using that course to develop our skills as instructional coaches, but also to work on building our program at Mercersburg.”  

While the coaching program is new, Smith sees the initiative as just the next logical step from the foundation Mercersburg has already built in providing support and opportunities for teachers to learn and grow.  

“Mercersburg has had a long history of providing professional development for our teachers,” Smith said. “When I first got here, I could tell right away that there was a lot of financial support for teachers to go to conferences and to improve their skills and general knowledge base and to keep working on continual growth.”

Over time, through the generous support of donors, Mercersburg started the Summer Institute, a dedicated week each August when Mercersburg teachers can collaborate and learn from some of the nation’s foremost educational leaders. The Institute is also open to teachers from other schools to come and join in the education and sharing of ideas. Many of the guest speakers continue working with Mercersburg faculty throughout the school year.

“The Summer Institute is honestly one of my favorite weeks of the year,” Maurer said. “It kicks off our school year, and we bring renowned experts in teaching, learning, memory, advising, social-emotional learning, counseling, mental health, and technology to campus to work with our teachers. The goal is really about seeing Mercersburg as a place that teaches teachers and being a beacon for educators, where we’re helping them learn how to hone their craft.”

Now entering its 10th year, the five-day institute in August 2024 included workshops delivered or facilitated by returning guest
and technology expert Greg Kulowiec;
clinical psychologist, author, and consultant Dr. Christopher Thurber; neuroscientist
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath; and representatives from the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. Maurer is already lining up speakers and presenters for summer 2025. 

“These are the experts that you would pay to see at a national conference, and we get to have them on campus working in small groups with our faculty.” Maurer said. “We also get to build ongoing relationships with them. A good example of that is Dr. Pooja Agarwal, who wrote Powerful Teaching, a fabulous book on the science of teaching and learning. She’s been back to campus several times. She was at our Institute a couple years ago. She was back for our all-faculty meeting to kick off the year, talking about retrieval practice in the classroom, and several of us are actually working with her on action research in our classrooms, trying to bring the best of what she’s teaching to our students.”

As both Maurer and Smith noted, the ongoing professional development opportunities and the Summer Institute have helped establish a common language for talking about teaching and best practices.

“I feel like our coaching programs are the next step from that,” Smith said. “So now we’ve had the Summer Institute going long enough that all of our teachers have to do it every three years, and a lot of them do it more. Some of our teachers do it every year. Now we have this common language, this common knowledge base about things like retrieval practice, the science of learning, emotional safety–these things that help our already strong teachers to continue to grow and improve in what they’re doing in the classroom. We’re at a place where we want to really create opportunities for our teachers.”

As Smith considers next steps, she wants to continue being responsive to the needs of the faculty. “I’m thinking one step at a time here, but I want to keep seeing the programs expand so that we have a coaching culture at Mercersburg,” Smith said. “That’s my real goal: I want to make sure that as we continue to meet the faculty’s needs in terms of their own goals for growth, that the coaching programs are being well utilized to support teachers.”

Maurer would like educators across the country to see Mercersburg as a destination for learning. “I often have the experts that we bring in say how much they enjoy working with our faculty, that it just feels different at our school than it feels at other places,” said Maurer. “That is so awesome. I just love that about being here. And so I think growing that network of people who see Mercersburg as a place where really good learning happens–that’s an ongoing goal of mine. Ultimately, I want people to say, ‘Oh, Mercersburg, they do that really, really well.’”