The Invisible Advantage: Great Teaching Is Not a Hope, It’s a Habit

By Dr. Jason Rogers, Head of School

It happens most often in a social setting… I run into a Rundle parent, and before long they tell me their child has the best teacher this year. I cannot help but agree, because when they say the teacher’s name, I know that teacher is absolutely extraordinary. So I follow up with a question… “What about last year’s teacher? How did you feel about them?” And the parent will say, “Of course, they were the best as well.” I often close by telling them, “I am happy to hear it, because I have a feeling next year’s teacher is going to be the best teacher, too.” This is one of my favourite conversations, and it sits at the heart of a question I have been asked by parents time and time again over the course of decades of teaching and leading at Rundle.

“What is the Rundle advantage?”

Notably, the question applies equally to each of our schools: Rundle Academy, Rundle College, and Rundle Studio.

For years, my answer has stayed remarkably consistent.

“It’s the teachers.”

Once you are a part of our community, you soon come to know that every child enjoys the experience of having a teacher who knows, sees, and values them, and who is an excellent pedagogue. This is supported by the fact that over the past decade, our staff retention has been extraordinarily high, so families know that year over year, 97% of our teachers will return.

When I share that the secret sauce is our incredible teaching staff, on occasion a deeply curious parent will ask the follow up question:

“But how do you know you have the best teachers?”

I have often answered this query as principal, and now as Head of School, by saying I have the opportunity to observe almost all of our teachers in practice every year, and I can attest firsthand that they are outstanding. But understandably, sometimes this statement is just not enough. Although this practice is reassuring, it is far from perfect. What I may have seen in these observations were pockets of excellence. Those pockets serve the greater good and uphold the quality of a Rundle education. But a personal assurance, however sincere, is not the same as a system that enables, promotes, and sustains teacher excellence.

Over the past four years, Nicole Jordan, our Head of Academics, and I have been visiting schools in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria. While at these schools, we asked about things like artificial intelligence, the science of reading, critical thinking, and values-based education, and we were always given a tour and the chance to speak with the senior leaders and teachers who live and work in these schools. Often we saw incredible facilities: climbing walls, pools, state of the art science labs, robotics arenas. We also regularly heard about the programs they run, whether IB, AP, Round Square, or a locally developed program that carries a child’s education to camps in the wilderness or to countries far abroad.

Rarely did we get a look inside a classroom, where the teaching and learning actually happen. However, almost never did we hear about the systems that make high-quality teaching possible. Schools understood fundraising, operations, leadership, student development, and international travel exceptionally well, and there is much we can learn from them. But at the end of the day, there was no systemized approach to excellence in teaching.

Each time, as Nicole and I returned to Calgary and thought about Rundle Schools, we could not help but think about Rundle’s invisible advantage: excellence in the classroom. Many people know that our teachers do a great job of seeing, hearing, valuing, and finding significance in every student.

What many people do not know about is Pathways to Teaching. It is a curriculum for teachers that we developed a number of years ago, informed by our lived experience, our academic journeys, and research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, MIT, and some of the leading schools we have studied. Every new teacher moves through it, and so does every returning teacher. It shapes how we train our staff, how we build each teacher’s professional growth plan, and how every teacher is evaluated. It is grounded in three values, and each is carried by four principles. Connection lives through personalization, empathy, community, and purpose. Care lives through joy, warmth, gratitude, and contribution. Craft lives through planning, assessment, instruction, and professional learning. Together, they turn what might otherwise be hopes into habits we can see, coach, and grow. That is not professional development. It is formation.

Most schools hope their teachers are great. We train them to be.

You can often feel it before you see it. It is the energy that reaches you in the hallway, or through a classroom door, when students are active in their learning: up, exchanging ideas, working with one another. When I think of how this lives in our schools, I often think of the classrooms of our talented junior high teachers. Students rarely sit. They are up at whiteboards working together to solve problems, living out the very first word of our values. They are connecting with one another because they care about the topic, and that care is leading to learning of the deepest kind. And it is the craft of the teacher, not in front of those students but alongside them, that allows them to find success. That balance of the science of teaching and learning with the art of both is truly the invisible advantage at Rundle.

So when a parent tells me this year’s teacher is the best, and last year’s was too, I know it is not by accident. It is by design. It comes through strong systems, careful implementation, and high expectations for our teachers balanced with high care. The answer to that savvy parent no longer rests on what I see in classrooms.

The guarantee has moved from a person to a system.

This is deeply aligned with our strategic plan, Deeply Rooted and Tomorrow Ready. We will not maintain our advantage by chasing shiny things. We will continue to adapt, and to be resilient, in the face of everything that keeps changing in our world, in education, and in society, and it is that adaptability that makes us ready for tomorrow. But it is human connection that makes us deeply rooted. Our values, Together: Be Kind, Be Curious, Be Well, are not changing. Our mission, to help students reach their potential and to celebrate with them when they do, remains firmly intact. And beneath it all sits a central belief.

Love and connection are not soft ideas. 
They are the conditions that make meaningful learning possible.

And so I want to leave you with an invitation. Notice this in your child’s teachers. Notice how much they love their curriculum, and how much they love their students. Notice how deeply they connect with their subject, and how carefully they connect your child to what they are learning. Listen for it in your upcoming parent teacher conferences, and in the casual conversations you have with your child as you drive to and from school. I believe that once you see the invisible advantage, you will never stop seeing it.