Committed to Collaborative Staff Planning, Learning

Finding time for teachers to collaborate is one of the most vexing challenges for school districts to tackle

Finding time for teachers to collaborate is one of the most vexing challenges for school districts to tackle. Scheduling is incredibly complex, and teachers need to factor in their individual planning time as well.

The leadership of the Lake County Schools in Tavares, Fla., considered common time for professionals an imperative and has made it happen. The district dipped into a $4 million innovative professional development grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, awarded in 2014, to create at least six models for improving scheduling to promote collaborative time for teachers, according to Amy Cockroft, the district’s director of professional and personalized learning.

At the middle school where Cockroft previously was principal, the instructional staff members who weren’t tied to students all day — media specialists, literacy coaches and guidance counselors, notably — were assigned to run class sessions on bullying, alcohol and drug abuse and similar topics to free up teachers who previously were expected to sit in on those lessons.

“We could then pull teachers out to learn,” Cockroft says. “It’s about looking at maximizing time.”

Real-Time Context

This shifting of responsibilities gave teachers three additional days of professional learning throughout the year. Teachers already had a common planning period and a weekly professional learning community session, Cockroft says, and the district fit in staff development during an early-release day every Wednesday.

The district has shifted its thinking away from providing full-day, pullout programs in favor of more nimble and timely training, such as two hours of collaboration and team lesson planning, two hours of individual, personalized learning of a teacher’s choosing and a few hours to observe a master teacher at another school, says Andrea Pyatt, Lake County’s innovative professional development facilitator.

This type of job-embedded collaboration has impact, Cockroft says. An external evaluation found teachers believe it improves their professional practice, have more ownership over their professional learning and feel the quality of professional development now is more relevant. Trust between teachers and school leadership also has measurably improved, Cockroft says.

“If it’s not in real time and if it’s out of the context of the teacher’s day-to-day, it’s not going to work,” Pyatt adds. “This puts teachers on the platform as the lead learners in their school with their colleagues. They are the ones that know best.”