success in a new environment, regardless of what’s happened before. Mentoring by adults is a great model for what you want teachers to reproduce in the classroom: that exact student-teacher interaction. Mentoring ensures conversations: serious ones, about what’s crucial for effectiveness here, and light ones, about the nuts and bolts. “When things aren’t going well, a process should meet the issues of concern headon (we call it ‘evaluation for concern’ here at Roeper). The process should provide methodology to address the problems. It should put up front what’s at stake in the resolution. That said, these processes see variable rates of success, because teaching is an intensely human, personal enterprise. It involves natural emotions, reactions and behaviors that are difficult to change. A teacher’s own experience with education has a huge impact on him or
her. That factor profoundly affects a teacher’s investment in education and sense of a teaching model (positive or negative). “An assessment model that does work well is a periodic review that is not evaluative. On a cycle of set years, a teacher working with an administrator proposes and embarks on an extensive professional development plan. That allows for great individual growth. “The narrower and more clearly defined a school’s culture and goals are, the better teachers and students seem to do. You see examples of this in all kinds of settings: KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, small urban charter schools, religious schools, certain public schools and independent schools. In these cases, faculty are very clear about why they’re there, how they’re teaching and why; and families, children and parents, are invested. The more schools like this become normative, the more likely the public is to sit up and take notice.”
Randall has been the head of school at the Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham, Michigan, since 2004; prior to that he served for seven years as the head of Middle School at the Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland. Earlier in his career, he worked at the Potomac School in McLean, Virginia; in the Brookline, Massachusetts, public school system; at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts; at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts; and at Derby Academy in Hingham, Massachusetts. Randall was born in Jamaica and moved to Boston as a child. After Milton, he earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology at Brown University. Randall later received his master’s degree in education from Harvard University with a focus on human development and psychology. Cathleen D. Everett
“Independent schools and public schools share many more interests than they acknowledge, and more cooperation would help everyone make progress. For instance, there’s nothing in the national teaching standards that is so objectionable to private schools. Put together by thoughtful folks looking at interactive children, they’re broad enough so that private schools should take a close look at them.”
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Milton Magazine