A Culture of Lifelong Learning

A district leader’s tested series of five professional development strategies for teacher growth

In the spring of each school year, the Burlington, N.J., Township School District would hold what was called a strategic planning convocation involving 50-60 teachers, administrators, board of education members and community residents.

In the culminating activity, the participants recommended what ought to be the school district’s primary objectives for the coming year, and these were adopted subsequently as official goals by the school board.

Imagine then what it would feel like as a teacher sitting in the audience at a ceremony on the school year’s opening day when the goals and objectives for all staff are unveiled. You see the same ideas that were etched on a flip chart just weeks before, something to which you contributed, now made official. The notion you were essential to the school system’s strategic planning is powerful. I’ve had teachers approach me to say, “I can’t tell you how meaningful it was to know that I had a voice in our direction for the future.”

Articulated Goal Setting

The 4,300-student Burlington Township School District, where I served as superintendent for almost nine years through 2014, worked to ensure all members of the district team were rowing in the same direction when it came to schoolwide and districtwide improvement. A well-articulated and structured system of annual goal setting facilitated how we prioritized district initiatives, including professional growth opportunities for teachers and staff.

Each year, the district studied student achievement data, teacher needs and other factors to identify goals under broad areas of school improvement, such as curriculum and instruction or community engagement. The district then used time in multiple and flexible ways to structure growth opportunities to meet teachers’ individual and group needs. These included workshops developed and delivered by teachers, professional learning communities, department content-based learning, peer observation and conferencing and larger group workshops.

Effective teacher professional development must be thoughtfully designed with teacher input and should account for what we know about how adults learn. Effective teacher learning occurs in the context of a schoolwide culture of lifelong learning. It is an ongoing process, not an event. It means designing varied and connected learning experiences in multiple contexts.

Five Measures

Achieving effective professional learning experiences may conflict with the inordinate amount of teacher training time required to support mandates not directly related to teaching, learning, curriculum, instruction and assessment. There are creative ways to overcome this perennial tug-of-war over our most precious resource — time.

Here are five distinctive strategies we used in our school district to promote professional growth:

 Use the calendar.
Burlington Township built into its calendar numerous early dismissals and late arrivals for students. They were spread throughout the school year to support teacher growth and learning opportunities.

These days should fall during months in which fewer calendar disruptions occur. Parents and school boards can be very understanding of the need for professional learning for teachers when the issue is framed thoughtfully. Inconveniences are more likely to be overlooked when seen as a wise investment in better instruction.

Work with your local YMCA, Boys and Girls Club or other childcare organizations to offer before- or after-care for younger students on these days.

 Develop professional learning communities.
The Burlington County Special Services School District (where I spent the past three years as superintendent) used Google Forms to survey teachers about their topics of interest and used the results to formulate professional learning communities. These teacher communities addressed specific areas of learning, such as applied behavior analysis, supporting families of children with autism and differentiating instruction to encourage student engagement. The PLCs then reported their learning and findings to the larger faculty.

Consider rotating faculty meetings with PLC meetings as often as permitted by local collective bargaining agreements. PLCs should be tightly structured and well-facilitated and should result in products and findings. Invest the time to teach participants how PLCs should work.

 Use faculty meeting time thoughtfully.
Don’t squander faculty meeting time on reading announcements that can be shared prior to the meeting. Use technology tools such as Google Drive or Dropbox to facilitate efficient and effective sharing of information. Hold everyone, teachers and administrators, accountable for reading the information. The principal should not be standing in the front of the room for more than 15 minutes.

A limited amount of faculty meeting time can be used for questions and clarification, but most of the time should be spent on professional growth, PLC reporting, teacher-created mini workshops, informal sharing of best practices or turnkey training from out-of-district workshops attended by educators.

 Create a peer observation program.
Peer observation programs allow teachers to volunteer to cover a colleague’s class so that teachers can observe another colleague. In turn, the teacher who had the opportunity to observe will cover for another colleague to allow them to do the same. It’s a “pay it forward” model.

Encourage teachers to debrief about the visits. Suggest a protocol grounded in best practices to guide such discussions. Collect no documentation on the visits other than perhaps how many took place for measurement purposes.

Consider having a collective bargaining unit (association) member or a teacher leader coordinate the model so as to keep administrators completely out of it. You don’t want the staff to worry that administrators are monitoring participation. The idea is that teachers should not do this out of obligation or fear of judgment. You want to develop a culture of professional growth out of sincere desire to learn, which cannot be developed through guilt, coercion or fear.

 Add a valuable step to the observation cycle.
In Montgomery Township, N.J., administrators conducted “pre-pre-teacher observation conferences” that focus on a specific area of pedagogy that is of interest to the teacher. Even if it can only be done once per semester or year with targeted teachers, this process can be a valuable learning experience. After the conference, the school leader develops a lesson consistent with the teacher’s unit/plan and teaches the lesson for the students, applying techniques consistent with the teacher’s stated areas of focus. The teacher observes.

After the administrator’s lesson, a “post-pre-conference” should be conducted to allow for reflection on the administrator’s lesson and how the teacher will incorporate strategies learned. When the teacher identifies lessons learned, the “post-pre-conference” will smoothly transition into a pre-conference on the teacher’s lesson for the administrators to formally observe. Once the observation is conducted, hold a more traditional post-conference.

This process may sound onerous, but it adds only two steps to the observation process and is extraordinarily powerful. It adds value, professional dialogue and learning to what is often a rote observation process. It positions the school administrator as a real educational leader, a master teacher and a teacher leader.

Every new administrator should consider doing this. Word will spread like wildfire that the administrator can actually teach, which will result in instantaneous “street credibility” (provided they can teach skillfully).

Priority Work

Effective professional development for teachers is not a matter of inviting outside presenters to conduct staff workshops while administrators sit in the back of the room or, worse, return to their office to “get work done.”

Professional development is the work. Effective professional development is about leadership, modeling and nurturing a culture of love of learning, growth, collaboration and innovative risk-taking among the adults who work in your schools and district. This, in turn, translates into a culture of lifelong love of learning for students.