CONGRESSIONAL SCHOOL BLOG

New Faculty and Learning Targets: Aiming for Successful Starts!

2025 Head of School Faculty Innovation Grant Winners: Susie Welty & Maura Rice

Imagine a new teacher joining Congressional’s faculty: they’ve studied the curriculum, completed their new teacher orientation, and are eager to begin. Even with an open, communicative mentor by their side, the journey to becoming fully onboarded takes a complete academic cycle. A first-year teacher navigates a constant stream of "firsts" and will have many questions. To bridge this gap, seasoned educators Maura Rice (Junior Kindergarten) and Susie Welty (Preschool) have drawn on their years of mentoring experience to develop a comprehensive new resource designed to support new faculty in their first year of teaching.

While the school’s highly detailed curriculum map provides a fantastic overview of Congressional’s academic program, Maura and Susie recognize that new teachers often need a more accessible tool for day-to-day planning. To streamline the transition into a new classroom, they have developed Learning Target Binders. These user-friendly resources are organized by month and content area, covering Math, Language Arts, Literature, Science, and Social Studies, providing a high-level summary of monthly themes and objectives in a convenient, at-a-glance format.

“The goal is for consistency,” says Maura. “We’ve built an amazing program at Congressional, and the aim is to ensure a new teacher coming in is aware of benchmarks and expectations, and that the continuity of our program is maintained.”

“The Learning Target Binders are designed as living documents,” says Susie. "The idea is for them to evolve over time and to highlight the joy of what we do. The binders include suggestions, not lesson plans, leaving plenty of room for new teachers to bring their creativity and imagination to the lessons.”

Student and teacher in a preschool classroom

Maura and Susie have leveraged their 2025 Head of School Innovation Grant award to create Junior Kindergarten and Preschool binders as models for other faculty to develop their own grade-level or subject-area binders.

“The Innovation Grant is helping us achieve a long-term professional development goal: to truly be a mentor to other teachers,” say Maura and Susie. “Our hope is for new teachers to feel confident in their knowledge of what is happening each month, to plan ahead efficiently, and feel empowered rather than a little behind the curve.”