Content for this piece comes from the January Folio Advisory Board Panel on the topic of accreditation.
Instead of being an all-consuming exercise in compliance, what if your school's accreditation cycle could be a meaningful opportunity to drive genuine, lasting professional growth for your faculty and staff?
During our recent Advisory Board panel, leaders from independent schools across the country shared how they navigated their latest accreditation process. The clear takeaway: the rules of the game are changing. Accreditation is shifting from a box-checking exercise to a deep dive into a school's culture.
"The accreditation process has moved from box-checking to something that is more about...driving the school forward and giving us a chance to reflect."
~Matthew Roach, Director of Teaching & Learning at The Peddie School
Here are three critical questions independent school leaders should be asking themselves as they prepare for their next accreditation cycle.
Why are accreditation standards around professional growth becoming harder to meet?
The biggest challenge facing schools today is not writing a growth process—it’s proving that the process is consistently and effectively implemented.
One of the most failed standards for schools is around faculty and staff development. During this fall, Folio Co-Executive Director Liz Kornheiser, spoke with several accrediting organizations and they noted a need for improved consistency of documentation, process, and implementation for faculty and staff development. We call this the Consistency Gap.
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THE PROBLEM: Your self-study report might articulate an ambitious, growth-focused professional development model. However, when the visiting committee arrives, they interview teachers and administrators across all divisions and departments. If the conversations reveal uneven implementation, non-standardized documentation, or entire departments where the process is ignored, you've hit the gap.
- THE VISITING COMMITTEE'S FOCUS: They want to know how division heads or HR departments track the work happening between formal review years. This exact question came up for Sarah Mansfield, Assistant Head of School at St. Christopher’s School (VA):
"The committee asked: 'How do division heads/HR track the work of interim years within the Professional Growth Model?' We were able to answer by showing them how myFolio incorporates all of the faculty observation notes and tracks annual goals and professional development."
~Sarah Mansfield, Assistant Head of School at St. Christopher's School (VA)
They are looking for clear, witnessable evidence of your documented professional growth process.
How can we make professional growth continuous and not just a one-off event?
The process you set up must be robust enough to survive natural transitions in school leadership and faculty. This concept of longevity and consistency of process is increasingly important to accrediting bodies.
The reality is that leadership turns over. A Dean of Faculty or Head of School who championed a process may move on, taking institutional memory—and often the organization system—with them.
- THE RISK: Without a dedicated, consistent infrastructure, your school risks losing years of valuable goal-setting, observation notes, and reflection data. This not only makes accreditation reporting difficult (more than one leader noted having to pull documentation from multiple sources after a leadership change), but it also fragments your faculty's professional history. This fragmentation harms institutional efforts, resulting in lower morale and resistance from faculty and staff, especially when leadership changes cause the professional growth system to fail and erode trust.
- THE SOLUTION: The professional growth process should live at the school level, independent of any one individual. It should be a system where even a new division head can immediately see the goals, progress, and feedback history of every faculty member. This continuity is a powerful signal to a visiting team that your growth process is deeply embedded in the school’s culture, not just tied to a person.
We use Google Docs/Sheets—why isn't that enough to provide evidence?
Many schools start with general-purpose tools like Google Drive or SurveyMonkey. They are flexible, but their flexibility is also their flaw when it comes to the demands of accreditation. St. Christopher's pre-Folio system involved a maze of linked documents:
"Prior to using Folio, I jerry-rigged Google Docs and created documents for every teacher. I had links for links for links, and nobody could ever find anything."
~Sarah Mansfield, Assistant Head of School at St. Christopher's School (VA)
This creates an enormous administrative lift and undermines the goal of shared growth.
- ACCOUNTABILITY: General tools cannot provide the necessary accountability and oversight. On the need for a dedicated tool, Kevin Costa, Director of LifeReady at McDonogh School, advised, "myFolio will give you all of the oversight you need in a way that still protects teachers." Dedicated platforms allow administrators to easily track participation rates across the school, ensuring a standardized process.
- DATA INTEGRITY: The new era of accreditation requires submitting verifiable data and evidence. When data lives in a unified platform like myFolio, it centralizes all the necessary evidence—goals, rubrics, peer observations, and professional development records—making it easy to generate the kind of documentation that satisfies a visiting team.
“One thing that was really helpful for our accreditation were the [myFolio Data] Snapshots. We were able to use a Snapshot slide and a sample PDF of a teacher's observation notes as evidence—showing supervisor comments, feedback, and peer observations—and [the visiting team] never asked to open up anything more. The data validated the numbers behind what we said we were doing. If we saw we were behind in meeting a goal, we would proactively set an improvement goal, making it so that we are already in agreement with the recommendation.”
~Rachel Morales, Academic Dean at Oaks Christian School
- CULTURE BUILDING: The best systems are designed to celebrate growth. myFolio includes a "Spotlights" feature to showcase teacher achievements. This moves the platform beyond a "formal document house" and turns it into a tool that actively encourages and celebrates your culture of growth, shifting the focus from a punitive or “gotcha” approach to one that actively supports and facilitates learning.
Conclusion: Turning Compliance into a Cultural Opportunity
Accreditation is a non-negotiable catalyst that requires you to step back and assess your school’s strengths and areas for growth.
“We are trying to really think about how we can make accreditation not just something that means passing and earning it, but really thinking about what makes it a valuable project for the school.”
~Marty Frazier, Dean of Faculty at Hathaway Brown School
Rather than merely surviving the review and focusing on compliance, use this strategic moment to implement a permanent, streamlined system. This shift moves the conversation toward building a true culture of professional growth, one that supports your faculty and staff, provides clear visibility to leadership, and offers verifiable proof of your school's commitment to excellence.
Accreditation doesn't have to be an audit—it can be a blueprint for excellence. Whether your goal is to build a new professional growth process or solidify an existing one, partnering with Folio provides the expert team and the sustained structure of the myFolio platform to help you achieve that excellence. Get started with a Folio expert.
CONTINUE YOUR LEARNING
Maryvale Preparatory School, an independent Catholic school for girls in Maryland, embarked on a mission to evolve its faculty and staff observation system.
Learn how they implemented a comprehensive observation process—integrating both formal and informal methods—using the myFolio platform to foster a community of continuous professional growth.