Personalizing PD

As a district leader, a big part of my job revolves around facilitating staff professional growth. As a leader with over a decade’s experience leading classrooms, I am keenly aware of the shortcomings of district and school professional development. That’s why Sarah Schwartz’s article in Education Week, “What do teachers really want from professional development? Respect”, piqued my interest. While leaders encourage teachers to differentiate in the classroom to drive growth for all learners, professional development is often not differentiated for experience, area of expertise, or teaching strengths. This doesn’t make much sense, and leaders know it. Nevertheless, not much has changed. In many districts, staff still attend one-size-fits-all trainings, and most teachers still see professional development as a colossal waste of time. Don’t believe me? Just observe the teachers as they begin to check their emails and pull out grading as the PD wears on and on and on.

What can we do to improve PD? First, involve teachers in PD development. While it’s true that district goals, school growth plans, and state mandates often guide PD, that guidance is usually provided in broad strokes: assessment, curriculum, behavior, interventions. Teachers are a fantastic resource for determining how broad topics should be addressed to better meet the needs of staff and students.

Another way that schools and districts can improve PD is by providing bandwidth for Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and job-embedded coaching. This may mean carving out time in the instructional week for teams of teachers to work together. This also means that leaders must become adept facilitators in PLCs. School and district leaders can best guide PLCs by observing, listening, and asking the right questions.

In schools that cannot afford to hire instructional coaching staff, school and district leaders must ask themselves, “how can we provide personalized PD and job-embedded coaching?” This may mean that assistant principals act as instructional coaches, co-planning and co-teaching with staff. Leadership duties must be well-organized to allow principals and assistant principals the space to spend large blocks of time in planning, coaching, and teaching.

Finally, school leaders need to be mindful of PD follow-up. When staff are given new programs to implement, school leadership must shift into “shepherd mode”: guiding and facilitating the implementation of new practices. It is leadership’s role to strategically plan for job-embedded PD that guides teachers through the process of applying, reflecting upon, and tweaking new skills.

Professional development will never be perfect. For every novel PD modality, there will be a group of resistors and naysayers. Reflecting on how to move school and district PD practices forward is a necessary step towards improving instruction for the benefit of students, and helping students is the heart of our work.