Well-designed professional development creates a professional learning community and focuses everyone's attention on improved staff performance and student learning. Too frequently, professional development is viewed as secondary to other school obligations. But such a view is shortsighted; it ignores the long-term return on investment to students when teachers, administrators and other staff have regular opportunities to work together as they build their knowledge and expertise.
In effective small schools professional development is strategically aligned with the schools’ vision and includes accountability measures (such as oral and written reports, peer reviews, classroom observations, and data analyses) that provide feedback on the impact of training activities. The autonomy of small schools allows them to design schedules that support regular collaboration among teachers and staff, and provide a wide range of opportunities—from workshops to action research to critical friends networks—to define, practice, reflect on, share and evaluate effective practices.
High quality professional development is results-driven, standards-based and job-embedded. It provides opportunities for ongoing learning that involves and engages the whole staff in positive growth toward achieving the school's vision of excellence. Some strategies for structuring effective professional development, as outlined by the National Staff Development Center, include:
- Value staff ownership. Most of the staff development that is conducted with K-12 teachers follows a short-term transmission model—training is often episodic with no sequence of skill development or follow-up. Rarely are participants given an opportunity to comment on what training is needed and as a result, activities frequently focus on issues that have little relation to what is already going on in classrooms, the school or the district. To be meaningful, staff development should reflect the vision of the school, be based on researched areas of need and acknowledge participants’ existing practice. Staff should be included in a variety of ways—such as using surveys, action research, critical friends networks and classroom observations—in planning the sequence of professional development activities and in assessing their efficacy over time.
Staff ownership of professional development is often overlooked. Schools need staff to be more than just compliant in their participation in professional development activities; they need them to be invested in the process as learners in a community. Professional development has the greatest impact when teachers and administrative staff can clearly identify the ways in which training is helping them make progress toward achieving a common set of goals for learners—students and adults—in the school.
- Make ongoing, collective learning the focus of professional development. Workshops, trainings and speakers are useful for introducing new concepts and strategies, but effective staff development helps educators fully understand the purposes and critical attributes of those new ideas, and their connection to other approaches. Promoting this kind of deep learning requires giving teachers and administrators frequent opportunities to practice new skills until those skills become automatic and habitual. Such opportunities should be school-wide, during the school day and in collaboration with colleagues. For example, joint lesson planning, curriculum mapping, group problem solving, discussion and dialogue, writing, and practice with feedback are opportunities for day-to-day active learning. Engaging in these types of professional conversations gives teachers and staff the chance to internalize what they learn and define areas in which additional learning is needed.
- Acknowledge different learning styles. The most powerful forms of professional development often combine learning strategies. Because people have different learning styles and strengths, professional development must include opportunities to see, hear, and do various actions in relation to the content. It is also important that educators are able to learn alone and with others and, whenever possible, have choices among learning activities.
For many educators, staff development is synonymous with training, workshops and large group presentations. Awareness of new ideas may be achieved through these approaches, but unless they include numerous live or video models of new instructional strategies, demonstrations in teachers' classrooms and coaching or other forms of follow-up, new ideas are not likely to become a routine part of teachers' instructional practice. Teacher and administrator learning can occur through collaborative lesson design, the examination of student work, curriculum development, case studies, action research, study groups and professional networks.
It is essential that staff development leaders and providers select learning strategies based on the intended outcome, and participants' prior knowledge and experience. For example, an extended summer institute with follow-up sessions, action research and study groups will deepen teachers' content knowledge and provide necessary feedback when implementing new instructional strategies. A two-hour after-school workshop will not achieve that goal.
- Use data to target professional development efforts.Data from various sources can serve a number of important staff development purposes.
First, data on student learning gathered from standardized tests, district-made tests, student work samples, portfolios, and other sources provide important input to the selection of school or district improvement goals and provide focus for staff development efforts. This process of data analysis and goal development typically determines the content of teachers' professional learning in the areas of instruction, curriculum, and assessment.
Second, data can be used in the design and evaluation of staff development efforts, both for formative and summative purposes. Early in a staff development effort, leaders must decide what adults will learn and be able to do and which types of evidence will be accepted as indicators of success. They also determine ways to gather that evidence throughout the change process to help make midcourse corrections to strengthen the work of leaders and providers. Data can also indicate to policy makers and funders the impact of staff development on teacher practice and student learning.
A third use of data occurs at the classroom level as teachers gather evidence of improvements in student learning to determine the effects of their professional learning on their own students. Because improvements in student learning are a powerful motivator for teachers, evidence of such improvements as a result of staff development experiences helps sustain teacher momentum during the inevitable frustrations and setbacks that accompany complex change efforts.
Review this element on the Oregon Small Schools Initiative School Change Rubric Self-Assessment Tool.
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