Sticky Issues
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Sticky Issues Archive >
In this section, principals tell how they handled a challenging situation, how some policy that was in place actually worked, and the lessons learned from dealing with these Sticky Issues. Send your stories to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Establishing a Norm of Professionalism
We were fortunate at one time in our school district to have professional development days scheduled throughout the school year and monthly early dismissal days. Early on, when planning the early dismissal days, inevitably a teacher would say to me, “Since it is just an inservice day, do you mind if I schedule my doctor’s appointment for after school and leave early?“ To which I would inevitably say, “Our professional development time is a valuable resource and must be treated as just as important as our regular work day.” A few teachers would schedule a personal day off for the professional development day, again saying, “Since it is just a professional development day, and I don’t have kids, it’s a good time for me to schedule off.”
Part of the issue is that in the early days, “inservice days” were just that—“sit and get” inservice days. I can remember being on the provider end of professional development as a staff development supervisor. Harried principals would call me a few days before a scheduled professional development day and ask, “What can you do/get for my staff for inservice day?” As a principal, I wanted our professional development to be the professional experience that I had been a proponent of, of a needs based, job-embedded opportunity growing out of a collaborative school culture. That’s why I was always surprised by staff members who viewed it as down time to do other things.
As the principal, I took responsibility for trying to shift the old professional development paradigm into the new paradigm of job-embedded work time to forge a community of learners and leaders. By having ongoing team meetings where we continuously looked at what was happening with our students and what we could do about it, we were able to identify the content of our meetings. Teachers shared the ownership of the professional development days as the context for our time to study and learn and plan together. The process of professional development days became natural and ongoing as outgrowths of our continuous work together. We used the Standards for Professional Development published by the National Staff Development Council as a basis for planning our professional development.
I learned that the principal is the “principal” or leading staff developer and the initial keeper of the vision of a professional learning community. When this vision becomes dim, the opportunity for professional learning time goes away.
