Building Excellent Educators: Inside Tabor’s Fellowship Program 

When recent college graduates arrive at boarding schools for their first professional jobs, they step into roles that demand far more than a typical entry-level position. At Tabor Academy—and across the boarding school community—these new educators are asked to teach, coach, work in residential life, and mentor students. They become part of a close-knit campus that asks them to wear multiple hats, build meaningful relationships, and discover what kind of educators and professionals they hope to become. 

Tabor’s Fellowship Program was created to help bridge the transition from college to independent school life by providing structure, support, mentorship, and a formal academic partnership. Tabor pairs a cohort of young professionals with experienced mentors, structured professional development, and immersive, hands-on experiences across campus. Fellows work in classrooms, dorms, athletic programs, admissions, advancement, and administrative offices while receiving guidance from veteran faculty and administrators. 

Now in its inaugural year, the program also includes a distinctive partnership with Bryant University’s Center for Teaching Excellence, giving fellows access to a customized professional development curriculum and a university-issued certificate on completion.

For Chief Employee Engagement Officer Nate Meleo ’95, P’28, ’29, who designed and oversees the program, the Fellowship Program emerged from a growing challenge facing independent schools. 

“It becomes harder and harder to find motivated, qualified people in all the areas that we need them to work in,” Meleo says. “The number of people that want to opt in to this lifestyle is diminishing.” 

Rather than simply searching for experienced boarding school educators, Meleo envisioned a program that could help Tabor cultivate and mentor its own next generation of faculty and school leaders. “My intent with the fellowship program is to do our part to actually grow boarding school educators in a very thoughtful and deliberate way,” he says. 

A Unique Experience

For first-year fellow Noah Phipps, who graduated from Williams College last spring, the path to Tabor combined two longtime passions: teaching and rowing. “I grew up in a family of teachers,” Phipps says. “My father’s a teacher, my grandfather is a teacher, and so I had a sense of what it would be like to be a teacher.” 

As he searched for opportunities after college, Phipps knew he wanted a role where he could both teach and coach. A conversation with a teammate eventually led him to Tabor’s newly launched Fellowship Program. 

Now, Phipps teaches Modern World History, coaches rowing, and serves as a house parent. On a typical spring morning, he wakes at 5 a.m. for rowing practice, helps launch boats into Sippican Harbor, teaches four sections of history, coaches again in the afternoon, and then heads to dorm duty at night. 

“It’s exhausting,” he says with a laugh. “But I love it.” 

What surprised Phipps most about boarding school life was the depth of the relationships formed across campus. “Everyone had told me that boarding school is its own world,” he says. “But then coming to Tabor, you really feel that universe start to build.” Those relationships develop in classrooms, on athletic teams, in the dorms, and through extracurricular activities. “I come back after a full day and out of the 26 students in the dorm, I’ve probably seen 12 to 14 of them already,” Phipps says. “I really feel like I have authentic connections with the students because I don’t just see them in one sphere.” 

Like Phipps, Dory Goodrich arrived at Tabor shortly after graduating from the University of Southern Maine. Goodrich works in the Advancement Office, coaches girls rowing, and serves as a house parent in Heath House. 

Goodrich also saw the Fellowship Program itself as a unique opportunity because of the mentorship the program provides. Goodrich focuses largely on young alumni engagement while also learning the many dimensions of independent school fundraising and relationship-building. “Hands down, the best part of my job is the people that I’m surrounded with,” she says. “The students, the faculty, the staff, the alumni that I work with—they all just make my job so easy.” 

The Fellowship Program has also helped her recognize how much flexibility and creativity boarding school life can offer. “I’ve learned here that I can create my own experience,” she says. “If I really care about SSV Tabor Boy, I can spend extra time there. If I really enjoy ceramics, I can go learn from the ceramics teachers.” 

At the same time, Goodrich says the experience has taught her the importance of balance. “The biggest challenge of my job is managing my time and being able to have a work-life balance,” she says. “It’s really easy for me to say yes to everything.” 

A Formal Learning Opportunity

The challenge Goodrich articulates, of learning how to navigate multiple roles while maintaining professional boundaries and personal wellness, became a major focus of the Bryant University partnership. Together, Tabor and Bryant created a customized 12-session professional development curriculum tailored specifically to the needs of Tabor’s fellows. Sessions cover topics ranging from classroom management and lesson design to communication and faculty wellness. 

The sessions were intentionally designed to address the realities of independent school life beyond the classroom. “We really cover the full personal experience that they’re having,” Constanza Bartholomae, Interim Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Bryant, says. 

Each Thursday evening, fellows gathered together for online sessions with Bryant faculty and guest speakers from across education and student life. “It’s a time to talk about things that are going on in our lives and how boarding school is so unique,” Goodrich says. “It’s also a really good time for all of us fellows to get together and bond and relate to each other.” 

Bartholomae says the program’s customized structure and small cohort model made it especially impactful. “Anyone can put together curriculum,” she says. “But to tailor and customize it to the people that you’re interacting with and adapt based upon the needs of the group is not something all programs have.” 

Henry Tarr, another fellow, has found that support system invaluable. A graduate of Middlebury College, Henry works in admission, teaches English, coaches football and lacrosse, and serves in residential life. 

His own boarding school experience at The Hotchkiss School inspired him to pursue education. “I credited a lot of my own maturation and my own growth to those teachers and coaches and mentors,” he says. “I realized, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to make a difference in somebody else’s life.’” 

Tarr says one of the strengths of the fellowship is the ability to explore many facets of school life simultaneously. “I love variety,” he says. “Working in the admissions office, teaching English, coaching two sports, working in the dorms—all of that is really crucial to what it means to be part of this community.” 

He also credits experienced faculty members for helping him navigate his first year in the classroom and beyond. “I came in having no teaching experience, being fresh out of college, leaning a lot on the people beside me,” he says. “I’m fortunate enough that I had great people beside me.” 

Teachers Learning From Teachers

Meleo believes mentorship is one of the program’s defining strengths. “I sort of liken it to a teaching hospital,” he says. “The fellows are fully fledged faculty members, but they have a lot to learn. So how do we give them real responsibility while also helping them course-correct along the way?” 

Each fellow is paired with mentors across their various responsibilities and meets regularly with Meleo to reflect on challenges, successes, and professional growth. “Every one of the fellows in their own way have come into this office and presented some aspect that’s been challenging,” Meleo says. “And I’ve been able to kind of talk through it or point them to people who do this really well.” 

Beyond supporting the fellows themselves, Meleo believes the program benefits the entire Tabor community. “What we hope is that we have adults who are all-in on what we’re doing here,” he says. “The fellows have instantly become able to connect with students quickly, easily, energetically." 

The cohort model has also created a strong sense of community among the fellows themselves. “There’s a community of six of us that are there for each other,” Tarr says. “We all have those days where it’s a long day. To have that group of people who are all going through the same thing has been huge.”