Faculty Professional Development: ‘Teaching Teachers to Teach Leadership’

Good leadership isn’t necessarily about being the most aggressive, dominant force in a space; more often, an excellent leader is defined by their ability to listen—especially in a community constructed around young adults still learning to use their unique voices. That’s the main nugget of truth that English Instructor Owen Kelley ’17 and History Instructors Brittany Foster and Mitch Kastilahn mined from their trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado, for the Gardner Carney Leadership Institute (gcLi) leadership lab over the summer.

Millbrook School commits significant resources to professional development for faculty each year, and gcLi is always a popular option. According to its website, the institute was founded on the belief “that students encounter opportunities to lead every day and teachers can help students recognize and succeed in these teachable moments”—or, as Kelley put it, “Teaching teachers to teach leadership.”

As a boarding school, Millbrook offers opportunities for students to lead in every space on campus, including the dorms, community service groups, clubs, athletic teams, and classrooms. So, sending our faculty to gcLi to learn how to help their students become better leaders is a no-brainer.

The training brought together a group of more than 150 K12 educators, many from Millbrook’s peer boarding schools in New England and all over the U.S. During the six-day conference, the attendees split into small focus groups to study and practice the leadership techniques they were learning. Kelley, Foster, and Kastilahn approached the training strategically, each joining different focus groups to ensure they encountered the widest range of perspectives possible. They then reconvened each night to discuss their takeaways from the day.

All recent entrants into the field of education—Kelley in 2023, Foster and Kastilahn in 2024—Millbrook’s representatives at gcLi found the leadership training invaluable to their roles as teachers, dorm parents, advisors, and coaches. They returned to Millbrook with tools that both make themselves better leaders and help them guide students to take charge in productive ways. As Foster summarized, “We learned about our leadership style and ourselves so that then we could teach students how to instill leadership in themselves. … It was a lot of taking the techniques we learned and doing them for ourselves to see how effective they are, so we can then have our students do them.”

The most useful tools they returned with are strategies for ensuring the diverse voices within their reach are heard and the concerns they raise addressed.

“It was just an incredibly informative experience, especially the learning side, in terms of brain development in adolescents and how different teaching and learning styles work better at different times,” Kelley said. “There were so many actionable tools and exercises to do and to bring to Millbrook, starting with my smaller spheres of influence—my advisory and my classroom—and then branching out beyond those smaller groups.”

He highlighted a specific technique he’ll use to reach out to the boys he works with called the social-emotional learning debrief exercise. The technique enables students to anonymously seek advice from their peers, who can only respond with a question, empathy, or wisdom. As an alumnus, Kelley comes from a place of empathy himself, understanding fully what it feels like to be an adolescent boy at Millbrook.

“By doing that exercise, you dictate the way people can respond to each other,” he explained. “But also responding with empathy, responding with wisdom, or responding with a question allows both the giver and the receiver to think about that moment honestly and respectfully. Also, doing it anonymously allows a child who might not want to express their feelings too openly the freedom to voice that and then receive a response without there being an acknowledgement of who said it. So, that’s something that I want to work on.”

Foster also spoke passionately about her plans to implement the leadership training she received at gcLi into her work at Millbrook, especially as it relates to giving all students a voice in institutional decisions.

“I now have so many different skills for teaching my students leadership,” she said. “And not just teaching leadership to student leaders, but also to our students who might not have gotten a leadership position, or they’re freshmen and they’re wondering how to fit into this wider community—giving them that agency of, ‘You have some say here, and we want to hear it.’”

She’s especially interested in hearing from students regarding the intersection of artificial intelligence and the classroom. Schools around the world are wrestling with this society-blitzing technology and its role in the learning process, and Foster believes Millbrook faculty can learn a lot from listening to students on the subject. “They’re using it every day, and they can give us the perspective of how they’re using it,” she explained.

While at gcLi, Foster, an assistant girls varsity hockey coach, workshopped and enacted a plan to help her team develop a winning mindset through journaling. She also picked up a listening technique to use with her advisory. Termed the consultancy protocol, the technique requires a person to bring up a challenge they’re struggling with, answering “yes/no” questions before stepping out of the group to listen—with absolutely no responding—to the group discuss solutions. “I’m thinking one of my advisees might have a problem that I as an advisor and faculty member might not be able to address,” she said. “Having them address their problem and then step out of the group and listen to how their classmates might solve that problem for them is useful—they’re not directly solving the problem, but they’re giving them ideas that maybe they haven’t considered.”

With faculty members like Kelley and Foster leading by example, Millbrook students are immersed in an ideal environment for learning to lead through listening.

Both Kelley and Foster expressed sincere gratitude that Millbrook gave them the opportunity to attend gcLi, and they’ve already begun advocating for their peers to attend next summer. It’s development opportunities like this that keep our faculty members equipped and energized as they embrace their calling to live the boarding school life of teaching, dorm parenting, advising, and coaching the next generation of leaders.

 

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