Schools come to GOA because they have a vision that matters deeply to their community, and they need help turning it into professional development their faculty can experience together. That's the work we do: partnering with instructional leaders to design professional learning that moves people, not just through content, but through a process that builds shared understanding and momentum that creates change.
When West Point Grey Academy (WPGA), an independent school in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a GOA member school, came to us in the lead-up to their 2025–26 school year, they had exactly that: a deep conviction and a complex charge. They were preparing to launch a long-term effort to Indigenize their curriculum, a values-driven commitment that would ask their entire senior school faculty to think differently about what they teach, why they teach it, and whose knowledge counts. Their September professional development day was the opening move. It needed to be right.
The team, made up of four instructional leaders at the school, tasked with designing the day included Sara Sjerven, Coordinator of Professional Development and Senior School English Teacher. This team was responsible for a day that would do a lot of heavy lifting: revisit the school's mission, vision, and values; connect faculty to the Indigenous Action Plan; introduce new curriculum frameworks; launch a new learning management system; and set the foundation for a multi-year curriculum mapping initiative, all in a single session, facilitated by WPGA leaders themselves.
They had vision. They had commitment. What they needed was help finding the shape of it all.
WPGA chose to consult with GOA to design professional learning and provide coaching, which meant that GOA's Amy Choi, Associate Director of Instruction, came alongside the team not just to help plan the September day, but to continue as a thought partner through the year ahead.
What Sara remembers most about working with Amy in those early planning sessions was the quality of the process itself. "Amy was incredibly useful in this process," she reflected, "as she helped to do two things: build our divergent and creative thinking processes in order to envision the day, and then help us to converge on the ideas that made the most sense in terms of moving the Senior School faculty forward."
Amy created space for each voice on the team, and then helped the group make decisions. "One of our biggest challenges was to bring our diverse perspectives together to make decisions," Sara shared, "and Amy was instrumental in creating space for each of us to be heard and for our ideas to come to light and then to help us make decisions."
From that process emerged two scholarly frameworks that would anchor the day — Verna J. Kirkness and Ray Barnhardt's "The Four R's: Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, Responsibility," and "Two-eyed seeing in the classroom environment: Concepts, approaches, and challenges" by A. Hatcher, C. Bartlett, A. Marshall, and M. Marshall. They also used a facilitation protocol, Connect, Extend, Challenge, that allowed every faculty member to enter the conversation from wherever they were in their own journey with Indigenous education. "The repetition of the protocol was also part of the grounding nature of the day," Sara noted, "and helped to keep things consistent and focused."
After September, the partnership continued. Sara was new to her role as Coordinator of Professional Development this year. She had an instinct that she should gather input from every faculty member and administrator in the Senior School before making decisions about the year's professional learning arc. "Amy encouraged me to pursue this goal although I had considered not doing so after meeting some initial resistance," Sara said. Amy helped her design a protocol for each listening session and introduced her to NotebookLM as a way to synthesize and share findings back with stakeholders. "What I really appreciate about Amy's approach," Sara reflected, "is that she recommends tools and ideas ethat she has used herself and pushed me to take steps and advance my own learning beyond what I would have had the courage to do on my own."
Once the listening tour was complete, Sara had data, relationships, and a much clearer sense of what her community needs. "This process has also helped me to build relationships with faculty I may not have worked as closely with," she said, "and it has helped to deepen my listening skills."
There's a particular kind of professional challenge that can come with taking on a new role or leading an initiative that matters deeply. You're figuring things out in real time, making decisions with incomplete information, trying to serve a community that has real and varied needs.
Good coaching doesn't remove that complexity; it helps you move through it with more intention and less isolation. A coach supports a leader to help them ask the right questions at the right moments. Sara captured this by saying, "Having Amy as a coach through this process of taking on a new role and rolling out a new initiative has been invaluable. I feel grateful to have had the time and access to a wise educator who both pushed me and encouraged me to do the work that needed to be done."
That, in the end, is what partnership in professional learning looks like; not arriving with answers, but helping people find their way to the right ones. Sara and the WPGA team came to GOA with a vision and goals. What they built, with instructional coaching through GOA, is a professional learning arc that belongs to their community. That's what we want for every school we work with.
As GOA’s Director of Engagement, Bonnie leads the organization’s efforts to connect and communicate with instructional leaders, professional learning leaders, students, parents/guardians, and summer‑program audiences—strengthening relationships and amplifying GOA’s impact. Prior to this role, she served as GOA’s Director of Professional Learning, designing and facilitating courses, cohorts, and programs for tens of thousands of educators worldwide.
Bonnie brings deep expertise in the education sector, having served as a school design coach, secondary school teacher, college advisor, and published author. She co‑wrote The Role of Noncognitive Skills in Student Success, a guidebook for educators, and a parent‑focused book on educational trends impacting families and students. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, ParentMap, and Education Week. Bonnie lives in Seattle with her husband, two children, a spirited rescue dog, and a laid‑back tortoise.
GOA is a nonprofit learning organization that reimagines learning to empower students and educators worldwide. In partnership with our global network of 150 schools, we provide interactive, relationship-driven courses, expert resources, and innovative thinking that help to expand and elevate academic programs. Together, we help students and educators become open to the extraordinary.
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