Schools are cyclical by nature, and for those of us who’ve dedicated our careers to teaching, late August always brings the familiar ritual of Faculty Professional Development week. Punctuated by feelings of anticipation and excitement, this intensive week gives teachers the space to set goals for student learning, prep for the new year, and meet new colleagues.

This year, I was one of those new colleagues.

Although this is my first year at CA, I was lucky enough to walk into my first faculty meeting recognizing nearly everyone’s face. Shortly after arriving from Minnesota, I invited any faculty member who wanted to meet with me to stop by my office. Knowing summer can be a busy time, I would've understood if the numbers had been slender, but nearly 60 faculty members took me up on my offer to meet. Everyone was warm and welcoming. I heard fabulous stories of how CA teachers got into education, got my first sense of the deep commitment they feel for their students, and learned volumes about this wonderful community.

Here and there, we also talked about last year—what was good and what was hard.

Although the pandemic affected every school differently, many of the things CA experienced last year were a mirror image of what we experienced at St. Paul Academy and Summit School, where I served as Upper School principal until last June.

As you might expect, the residue of last year has added another layer of anticipation to our Faculty Professional Development week, as we began conversations about what this newest phase of pandemic teaching might look like.

We still cringe when thinking back on how we had to move from brick-and-mortar teaching to online instruction seemingly overnight. Rough, too, was the merry-go-round of modalities we all endured last year. The juggling of hybrid, in-person, and remote learning made it feel like six years rolled into one.

And while we’re not out of the woods yet, the start of the 2021-2022 school year has a different feeling. A strong sense of optimism is circulating among the faculty.

Some of the reasons for this optimism are self-evident—more than 90% of Upper School students are vaccinated; we’re lucky enough to be learning in buildings with state-of-the-art ventilation systems; and our knowledge about the virus has increased to the point that our mitigation efforts are more strategic and effective than ever. But as many Upper School faculty have shared with me, this optimism is not borne just out of the leaps we’ve made in frustrating the spread of COVID-19, but in the leaps they’ve made in teaching.

Everyone recognizes that COVID-19 has been a tragedy. It has cost countless lives and caused incalculable heartbreak. But by all accounts, it’s also forced CA teachers to do the best teaching of their careers. They’ve adopted new tools, re-imagined the curriculum in new ways, and been affirmed in their belief that building community and scholars goes hand-in-hand.

As part of our professional development work this week, teachers were asked to reflect on the practices they adopted during the last chapter of the pandemic and how these one-time survival strategies might become innovations that change the way we teach in the future. Because of pandemic teaching, we have new questions to ask of ourselves and of our craft. What will we keep? What will we set aside? What new things have we learned about student learning that we can apply moving forward?

These are the types of questions teachers love. And these are the questions we are asking at CA as we head into the new year.