INFUSING QUAKER PROCESS INTO FRIENDS SELECT FACULTY MEETINGS

Miriam Rock

Context

When I joined the Friends Select community in 2018, faculty meetings were organized and led by the Upper School director. At my previous school, Sandy Spring Friends School, meetings were clerked by a member of the Upper School faculty who was selected by a nominating committee. When I became the first Upper School Quakerism Coordinator in 2020, I began an ongoing conversation with the Upper School Director, Chris, about Quaker life in our division. At his prior Quaker school, Chris had also experienced clerked faculty meetings. We had a series of conversations about the advantages of the clerked faculty meetings that we had previously participated in. While Chris ran efficient and thoughtful meetings, he and I felt that the meetings would benefit from having more Quaker processes integrated into the agenda setting and from wider community buy-in. Additionally, for many of the Upper School faculty, Friends Select was the first Quaker school they had worked at. We hoped that, by increasing their familiarity with Quaker Based Decision Making, it would give them the skills to support our students to further infuse their classes and co-curricular activities with Quaker processes.

Summary of Findings

Implementation Process

In the spring of 2023, we shifted the mode of our faculty meetings. Through a series of emails, surveys, and meetings, faculty were taught about the new plan, processes, and goals. I clerked the meetings for the remainder of the year, giving the group time to appoint a nominating committee which was tasked with selecting first the clerk and then the steering committee. At each phase, the faculty as a whole nominated potential candidates, and the nominating committee worked together to select different community members who were best suited to each position, with an eye to a diversity of experiences, perspectives, and expertise. After the nominating committee made their decisions for each role, they presented it to the faculty for approval. By May of 2023, we had selected our new clerk and new steering committee. The steering committee was composed of the clerk, the Upper School Director, the Quakerism Coordinator, and 2-3 at-large members.

We spent the 2023-2024 school year with the new system in place. The steering committee meets monthly to plan the agenda for the upcoming meetings. The Upper School faculty is clerked by a member of the community who works to get a sense of the meeting and ensure that we are hearing from a variety of different voices. Faculty members who have ideas for how to use upcoming time can bring it to any member of the steering committee, who endeavor to integrate the feedback.

In May of 2023, the Lower School Director, Dave, approached me to ask that I speak with the Lower School Faculty during their closing meetings. They had heard about what we were doing and hoped to integrate the model for their own faculty meetings. Over the summer, they worked to create a similar model, adapting the roles slightly given the needs of their division.

Community Feedback

Midway through the second school year, I shifted my focus to evaluating the effectiveness of this new model. Upper school faculty completed one survey in November 2023 and will complete a second in May 2024. The community feedback submitted by upper school faculty through an anonymous survey was largely positive. The majority of the faculty expressed that the new mode of faculty meetings was engaging, lived into our Quaker mission of the school, and created space for them to share their opinions and ideas. There was also appreciation for the way in which the new mode invited more voices into organizing and leading the meetings, and the ways in which this resulted in a clear and timed agenda being sent out ahead of time. Finally, a large cross section of people expressed appreciation for how thoughtfully the faculty clerk was leading the faculty in deepening our Quaker practices. Several community members expressed that they missed hearing directly from Chris. There was also some nostalgia for the casualness and spontaneity that often characterized the old mode of meetings and allowed for informal ways of connecting with colleagues.

In addition to capturing feedback from my colleagues in the Upper School, I met with Chris and Dave to hear about their perspectives on the new structure. Chris echoed much of what was said in the survey. He agreed that he missed having time to connect with the faculty during the meetings, but reframed the challenge as an opportunity for him to be more intentional about building authentic touchpoints with everyone on the faculty. Overall, Chris was pleased with the way in which the new mode created authentic and shared leadership opportunities. Dave’s sentiments were very similar to Chris’. He was pleased with how the new mode of meetings fostered more faculty agency and creativity in generating conversations and designing the structure of the respective meetings. Like Chris, Dave expressed that this process had helped him to isolate areas where he needed to more actively engage with faculty in building community and shared understandings.

Next Steps

This work has been incredibly gratifying and humbling. There are so many opportunities ahead of us: moments when the faculty will be called on to make a decision using Quaker based discernment practices, moments where we transition from one clerk to another or from one division director to another, places to deepen the work of the meetings, and places to deepen the faculty’s understanding and integration of Quakerism into our professional lives. I feel deeply humbled to be surrounded by so many talented colleagues interested in sharing this work with me, and look forward to continuing to facilitate it.

MIRIAM ROCK

Upper School English Teacher and Quakerism CoordinatorFriends Select SchoolPhiladelphia, PA

Miriam Rock is an Upper School English Teacher and Quakerism Coordinator at Friends Select School. In addition to teaching three sections of American Literature and a senior elective, she works with a group of student leaders to coordinate Quaker life in the Upper School. Miriam started her career as a student teacher at a magnet school in South Philadelphia before spending three years teaching at Sandy Spring Friends School. She also currently serves as the Board Chair at The Miquon School, a progressive elementary school in the greater Philadelphia area. She is a progressive educator and believes that the role of a teacher is to support students in unlocking their innate curiosity and building the skills to pursue it.