This month, Haverford welcomes Learning Support Specialist Mr. Jack Payne to the Enrichment and Learning Center (ELC).
Having been an English teacher for seventeen years before transitioning to learning support, he hopes to bring the two perspectives together to help students become their best selves.
Mr. Payne has previously taught at three nearby schools, yet Haverford’s model for its ELC stands out to him and was the feature that drew him to the school.
“Every school I worked at had a slightly different model for what their learning center looks like,” he said. “And the model here, the opt-in model, where the boys have to make the choice to come—I really like that because automatically you have a level of self-advocacy. Automatically you have built in somebody who wants to be better.”
The action of reaching out for help is something that Mr. Payne hopes to reinforce in his engagement with the Haverford community.
“It’s so easy to be comfortable, but where we are at our best is when we are courting that discomfort,” he said. “When we see something that is hard to do, and we make the decision we’re going to go do it anyway.”
He especially hopes to aid incoming Third Formers in their transition to upper school, providing them with the resources they need to succeed in a new, more intensive environment. He described it as helping new upper school students reach past their natural ceiling with the proper tools.
“I want my students to have a toolbox so that if a teacher says, ‘All right, you’re going to write a paper,’ I don’t want my student thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ I want my student thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve got to write a paper. These are the first five things on my checklist that I have to get done,’ so they can immediately spend their energy doing the work and not spend their intellectual energy figuring out how to do the work,” Mr. Payne said.
Mr. Payne is also an athlete. Having played football, ice hockey, and lacrosse in high school, he has continued to carry his passion for lacrosse to the present day.
“My son was born three years ago, and up until the point he was born, I had been involved in organized lacrosse as a player or a coach since I was ten years old,” Mr. Payne said. “I’ve worked for STX Manufacturing Company, I played it at a good level in college, and I spent a year coaching in England.”
“I really want to focus on getting in, doing this job as well as I can, learning the community, building relationships, and really understanding what my role is and how best I can join the team and serve the community of boys.”
Mr. Jack Payne
Despite this, Mr. Payne will not coach a sport during his first year, though he looks forward to any opportunity to do so later on.
“I really want to focus on getting in, doing this job as well as I can, learning the community, building relationships, and really understanding what my role is and how best I can join the team and serve the community of boys,” he said. “[Lacrosse] is the game I know the most. It’s the game I love the most. And Haverford has an amazing program. It’s a perennial national power… I’m sure there are a lot of opportunities at sub-varsity levels where I can step in and help out to some degree or another.”
Mr. Payne remains firm that his main goal is to impact students and help them reach their full potential.
“You have eighteen years’ worth of life under your belt, and there’s still more growing that you have to do physically and emotionally,” Mr. Payne said. “If I can help students understand the importance of those [academic and social] relationships, I think that’s a really powerful thing.”
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