Content for this piece comes from the October 2026 Folio Spark Session, “Elevating Peer Collaboration & Observations Through myFolio,” featuring Asha Appel, All School Director of Faculty Growth and Development at Oregon Episcopal School (OR), and Nikki Dantuono, Upper Division Head, and Jessica Hendricks, Lower Division Head, at Community School (MO).
Every school has teachers worth learning from. Most of them rarely see each other teach.
In many schools, classroom observation runs in one direction. A supervisor visits, takes notes and moves on. Administrators gain insight, but teachers miss the chance to learn from the colleague down the hall.
That gap costs more than it seems. Folio’s Director of School Success, Melissa Fast, hears the same worry from school leaders again and again: they are hiring new teachers every year. Her response during the session was simple: “Great people stay where they feel valued.” National research as well as our research brief, The State of Faculty Growth in Independent Schools, back her up. In a 2025 Vanderbilt Peabody College report based on NAIS’s faculty survey, leadership support was the strongest predictor of teacher morale and retention, and teachers ranked professional development among the most meaningful forms of recognition.
Peer observation is professional development that already lives in your building. In our October Spark Session, Asha Appel, All School Director of Faculty Growth and Development at Oregon Episcopal School (OR), and Nikki Dantuono and Jessica Hendricks, division heads at Community School (MO), shared how they use myFolio to make it happen. One school is eight years into this work. The other is finishing its first year. They reached the same conclusion: the best PD is right next door, and a school’s job is to make it easy to get there.
Teachers want to learn from each other. The obstacles are practical. “Aren’t we all just battling time?” Nikki asked. Teachers rarely have time to leave their own classrooms, and visits that depend on someone finding a free period tend not to happen.
Then there is the word “observation” itself. Jessica noted that some teachers are nervous peer visits will feel evaluative. And teachers rarely work across divisions. Asha noted that each division in a Pre-K–12 school rightly develops its own culture, and that teachers value chances to learn outside their silo.
The appetite is clearly there. In SAIS’s 2026 study of 1,558 independent school educators, 89.3% wanted more professional learning opportunities, but just 33.8% saw a clear path for advancement. What’s missing isn’t the desire to grow. It’s an easy, low-stakes way in.
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Portland, Oregon An Episcopal day and boarding school, Pre-K–12, with nearly 880 students. Folio member since 2025. |
St. Louis, Missouri An independent preschool and elementary school, age 3 through grade 6. Folio member since 2017. |
Now in its second year with Folio, OES is deepening eight years of professional growth work. What OES has built is a system where every teacher, Pre-K through 12, sees themselves as a learner.
OES didn’t begin with a tool or a schedule. It began with what the school believes about teaching. One of those beliefs is that learning doesn’t happen in isolation, for students or for teachers. As Asha put it, “The best professional development… is right next to you.”
From there, the school asked which systems would turn those beliefs into daily practice. Everything that followed, from coaching to peer visits, traces back to that list of beliefs.
OES deliberately keeps its growth cycle apart from professional expectations, which are handled separately. What teachers are accountable for is continuous growth, not hitting every mark at once.
Every teacher has individualized coaching in each year of the four-year cycle, from a trained coach who is “not above them, but rather alongside them, separate from an administrator.” Separate tracks for growth and evaluation is one of the five building blocks we describe in our post on making professional growth a strategic priority.
Peer visits work best when observers know what to look for. OES’s answer is the Characteristics of Effective Teaching, or CET: six themes (Cultivate Student Agency, Make Learning Visible, Model Lifelong Learning, Be a Warm Demander, Differentiate Instruction, and Cultivate Belonging), each with three to six outcomes and a set of reflective questions. When OES moved to myFolio, it renamed its “domains” as “themes” so the framework fit right in.
Teachers designed the CET themselves, through a design process Asha led over a year and a half. “We have had zero pushback, because teachers see themselves in what they’ve constructed,” she said. The same reflective questions now guide teachers’ self-assessments, their coaching conversations and their visits to each other’s classrooms.
This year, OES is making peer visits intentional through myFolio. Because every teacher has goals in the platform, Asha matches partners by those goals: sometimes two teachers working on the same thing, sometimes a teacher whose practice could help a colleague’s goal. Then her office schedules the visit.
That last step sounds small. Asha says it makes all the difference: “It makes such a difference for teachers when instead of being like, oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to get into your classroom, it actually is just on their calendar.” A peer visit that’s on the calendar is a peer visit that actually happens.
During the visit, the observer looks through the lens of their own goal, using guiding questions such as: What teacher moves could you try tomorrow? Notes shared within a group stay confidential to the group, so the platform feels like a safe space rather than another layer of supervision. Since last year, OES has also held Scrappy Innovators each March, a morning of teacher-led workshops built around the goals teachers have worked on all year.
“Teachers are constantly learning, and they are in each other’s classrooms as learners, not as evaluators.”
— Asha Appel, Oregon Episcopal School (OR)
Community School has been a Folio member since 2017, and both Nikki and Jessica used myFolio as classroom teachers before becoming division heads. With two full-time team teachers in most classrooms, collaboration is already part of the school’s identity. Peer observation across grades was the next step.
The idea didn’t come from administration. Teachers came to Jessica and Nikki asking for time to watch a colleague teach a lesson or use Responsive Classroom language. When they mentioned it to Melissa, she showed them how to set up observation groups in myFolio. As Jessica recalled, it wasn’t hard.
Starting in fall 2025, Jessica and Nikki assigned teachers to groups of three: one upper division teacher, one lower division teacher and one specialist. Each trio met at the start of the year to talk about goals, the feedback each teacher wanted and when visits could happen. The mix produced some memorable moments, including a very tall sixth-grade teacher searching for a chair in the nursery.
Every observer used the same lens: Responsive Classroom’s positive teacher language, which the whole faculty had just studied in a two-day workshop. A shared focus took the guesswork out of what to look for.
Jessica and Nikki built a short form in myFolio: a checklist of positive teacher language to mark during the visit, plus a brief note afterward. The observer submits it to the teacher they visited. The form is framed around what went well, because, as Jessica explained, they wanted a true collaboration, not something that felt evaluative.
Submitting feedback through myFolio also solved the time problem. Teachers didn’t need a shared free period to debrief; they could read the feedback whenever they had a moment. Nikki sees a bonus, too: the notes give teachers a chance to celebrate practices their colleagues never knew were happening down the hall.
By November, teachers told Jessica and Nikki that two observations in one year was too much. So the plan changed: each teacher would observe one colleague in 2025–26 and the other in 2026–27. “We took that feedback, and we just pivoted for them because we wanted it to be useful and not stressful,” Jessica said.
Next, they plan to strengthen the reflection step, and they may group future visits by the skills teachers want to see, an idea sparked by hearing Asha describe OES’s approach.
“Some teachers are nervous that it’s evaluative, and we didn’t want that. We wanted this to really be a true collaboration.”
— Jessica Hendricks, Community School (MO)
The best professional development at your school is already down the hall. The work is making it easy for teachers to get there.
Asha Appel All School Director of Faculty Growth and Development, Oregon Episcopal School
Asha brings more than three decades in independent schools to her work at OES, where she has led the design of the Faculty Growth Cycle and the creation of the school’s Portrait of a Graduate and The Center for Teaching and Learning. She previously served as Head of Upper School at OES and Director of Teaching and Learning at Kingswood Oxford School, and she has co-chaired the CAIS Professional Development Commission.
Nikki Dantuono Upper Division Head, Community School
Nikki joined Community School in 2010 and taught fourth grade for 11 years before becoming Upper Division Head. She holds a master’s degree in Educational Leadership from Wright State University and received the Lowenhaupt Award in 2016.
Jessica Hendricks Lower Division Head, Community School
Jessica joined Community School in 2004 as a first-grade teacher and now leads its lower division, from nursery through second grade. She holds a B.S. and M.Ed. in Elementary Education from the University of Missouri–St. Louis and a Certificate in Early Education Leadership from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.