Stories from the Field
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Time for Professional Development
One of the daunting challenges of providing high-quality professional development is finding the time for staff collaboration. Principals have been innovative and creative in carving out the necessary time for professional development. Some ideas include the following:
- District-sanctioned early dismissals
- District-sanctioned professional development days
- Provision of substitutes to release staff
- Providing in-school coverage by grouping students for special activities while teachers work together
- Use of “specials” to schedule grade-level teachers with common planning time
- Use of summer to plan professional development
At our school we tried another approach. We were relentless in writing for grants to fund our professional learning. We hired a former teacher from our own school who had retired. She came back and subbed for us four days a week. We devised a schedule allowing every teacher to have one half day per month to plan interventions, crunch data, develop lessons aligned with the district curriculum, attend professional development meetings, go on professional visitations to other programs and to carry out other professional responsibilities. The good thing about using an excellent retired teacher from the school is that the students knew her and she knew them. There was continuity in their learning without the usual discipline concerns. Of course the retired teacher loved coming back to her old school in this capacity and enjoyed the shortened workweek. The teachers kept a log of their activities during their professional development time. The results of this arrangement were that teachers brought many new ideas to their teaching, they brought suggestions for other professional development ideas that would help them to help their students, and there was an aura of professionalism and collaboration in the building. Teachers were able to reflect upon and improve their practice. Teachers were far better at analyzing their student data and were far more effective with student assessment and differentiation.
Another nuance of our professional development process was that if a teacher elected to attend a professional development conference or training, he/she was then asked to present the material at a subsequent staff meeting or at our summer retreat. For the very first summer retreat we held, several teachers had attended a school team conference earlier in the summer. They knew they would be required to present their respective session information to the rest of the staff. Each one asked for no more than 15 minutes to present. It was soon clear at the retreat, that each one needed more time as they had thoroughly prepared and were genuinely excited about their material. Each one went on much longer than their allotted 15 minutes. At the end of the retreat, one of the suggestions for the future was to “Make the retreat longer. We need more time!”
I learned that schools get better when everyone is a learner and everyone
becomes a leader. Professional development opportunities provided the
mechanism for teachers to be reflective, accountable, and professional.
