Inside AASA: Bryan Joffe on Innovative Professional Development

Inside AASA

A school’s greatest resource is its personnel — the principal, department chairs and faculty. According to Bryan Joffe, AASA’s project director of education and youth development, the best investments in professional development support year-round, school-embedded, teacher-centered activities.

In 2014, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, AASA launched an Innovative Professional Development, or iPD, initiative to raise the profile of professional growth and highlight approaches that staff see as meaningful and compelling, rather than compulsory. The work began more than two years ago in Fulton County, Ga., Miami-Dade County, Fla., and Syracuse, N.Y. This year, Palm Beach County, Fla., and Baltimore County, Md., became partner districts.

The following is the full transcript of AASA staffer Rebecca Shaw's interview with Joffe.

What is innovative professional development? 

At AASA, we’re working on an initiative around Innovative Professional Development (iPD), which we consider a really teacher-centered, teacher-focused professional development structure, which has empowered and affected teachers at the center of our work.  

It involves identifying a personalized Professional Development (PD) plan for each teacher, delivering that professional development through multiple modes, and then having a continuous feedback loop where we are monitoring what’s working and what’s not, and altering the plan as we go. Then we start again by identifying whatever needs [the teachers] have after that first round of development. 

The purpose is really to ensure that school districts get a greater return on investment for the professional development that they provide for teachers. The greatest resource for school districts is the personnel that they have in the principal ship, in department chairs, and in their teaching faculty. There’s a lot of effort in developing that staff so they can be as effective as possible. We want to look at the ways that systems and structures, as well as data and delivery methods, affect how well the development is working for teachers across a district. 

What’s the primary goal of AASA’s innovative professional development (iPD) initiative? 

At AASA, we are funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to work on this iPD initiative. I would say one of the main goals is to highlight professional development as a really important practice for school districts. I think during the economic recession, when school districts were forced to make tough choices about their budgets, professional development was often cut or overlooked as a place where savings could be had. Of course we need a lot of great teachers in the classroom, and the curriculum and textbooks … but professional development needs to stay a major part of a district’s initiative, if we are going to improve and get the kinds of graduation rates and closing achievement gaps that we want to see in districts. 

So one of our goals is raise the profile of professional development and highlight the need for professional development to be effective and meaningful, rather than just compulsory—where teachers complete it because they have to sit through a number of hours. We want to make those hours really meaningful, so that older teachers are getting newer practices and newer teachers are getting developed by more experienced teachers to learn what works best in the classroom, so we can ensure that every student has a great experience in every classroom. 

How have your past experiences here at AASA or previously informed this work?

One of the things we did was look at school districts and post-secondary success for students. We had school districts identify how students that graduated from their schools did in college.  We looked at their post-secondary persistence, attendance, and completion rates to try to see what kind of course tracks helped make students successful when they got to college.  [For example], was taking Algebra in 8th grade really important, and did that correlate to greater college success? 

I think in that work, where we talked about what students really need from middle school and from high school; [for those schools] to be what we called launch pad high schools—to not be a destination where they graduate, but be able to launch them into college and career, really links together with our professional development work well.  
[With these districts], we were focusing on ‘how do you create a launchpad high school?”, “how do you create a system that was really supporting students so they can be successful in post-secondary or in work?”

Professional development is a big part of that. For most districts you have to work with the staff that you have. Teachers work very hard, and have a lot on their plate already. You got this group, and you got to try to make it work, as best you can. 

So professional development is one tool you have to try to improve the practice, to try to get some coherence from classroom to classroom, so students have more of the same experiences, regardless of what classroom they happen to be in, whether there’s a new teacher or a more experienced teacher. Professional development helps to bring more coherence to those school strategies that superintendents and teachers are putting in place.  

Our work, I think, in school discipline as well, where we talk a lot about classroom management, and we talk a lot about how school climate and culture welcomes students or doesn’t--that also links well with our professional development efforts, where we are focused in on how principals and superintendents in particular, develop their staff around a series of issues. 

So professional development for equity or professional development with courageous conversations about race might be a great way to help mitigate the some of the racial disproportionality we’ve seen in school discipline with expulsions and suspensions, where children of color are more likely to be suspended or expelled. My work here at AASA really links all of these things together nicely. 

How does AASA as an organization benefit from concentrated attention on raising the caliber of professional development of school district personnel? 

Our organization is about developing and supporting highly effective school system leaders. I think one of the many hats that superintendents wear in their very challenging positions is about leading an organizational culture and leading an instructional faculty.  So professional development of school district personnel is a big part of a school superintendent’s job. 

For AASA as an organization, our content focuses help us be a better, smarter organization when we are supporting superintendents in that area in particular. Superintendents of course have to deal with the School Board, with their budget, with buses, but they also deal in this side with curriculum, and with teaching faculty, and with instruction. 
Superintendents are great instructional leaders. Our attention on professional development, I think, helps support school superintendents across the country as they look for ways to better develop their teaching staff. 

In 2014, AASA worked with three large urban school districts: Fulton County Schools (GA), Syracuse City School District (NY), and Miami Dade (Fla.) on PD Redesign. This year you’ve added two new partner districts to the mix: The School District of Palm Beach County (Fla.) and Baltimore County Public Schools (Md.).  

a. How were these particular large districts chosen? 

They were chosen in a variety of ways. In 2014, when we were applying for the grant, we were looking for districts that would support our application and would sign on to say that if AASA were to be funded for this work, that they would be districts that would work with us. We always look for geographic diversity; we look for superintendents we know to be great leaders of their districts in our mix. For our new grant, we had an application process because we were already funded. We accepted applications from a number of districts across the country, we had an evaluation team and a scoring rubric. 

Palm Beach County (Fla.) and Baltimore County (Md.) were chosen from among the applicants. The rest of the applicants for this year’s funding were invited to join our Community of Practice. So those districts that applied, but we weren’t able to fund are still able to work with us through our Community of Practice. 

b. What was the reason behind working with larger, urban districts rather than smaller and more rural districts?  

I think county districts in particular – like Fulton County, Palm Beach County, and Baltimore County- face some unique challenges.  I found that county districts are a good innovation laboratory for projects that AASA works on. County districts, generally speaking, have some urban schools, some more suburban schools, and even in some places they even have some rural school buildings within a much larger school district set up. They tend to serve a large number of students, so they face some challenges in terms of how do you have a coherent and aligned curriculum across those sites, how do oversee a large teaching faculty and ensure that there’s some synergy and strategy around what people are doing together? We like to work with those districts because if you can make innovative professional development work in a large county district, there are a lot of lessons and models that can be used for either just urban districts to serve a city or smaller suburban and rural districts that might have an easier time wrapping their arms around all the buildings that they serve. That’s one of the reasons we like to work with county districts. 

A major component of the iPD work is convening superintendents and other school system leaders into a PD Redesign Community of Practice. For instance, beginning in 2016, nearly 20 superintendents convened in person on a quarterly basis and meet virtually throughout the year.   Could you explain how a Community of Practice works?

Our superintendents are by nature the only individuals in their position, so if it’s a city or a county or a small rural place, they are the only superintendent for that district.

A Community of Practice offers an opportunity for superintendents from multiple places to come together, to share lessons, to bring a problem of practice to a group of peers to problem solve together.  

It’s amazing how isolated we can be in our own positions, all of us in our jobs, but superintendents in particular [need] to see what’s working and what’s not working in their place. Sometimes having a different perspective from another state, from another district, from another group of superintendents around the table can maybe spark a new idea or shed some light. You know, one of our favorite things is when people just outright steal from each other, or they love an idea that someone is working on, and they say “I’m going to start that at my district, can you send me the framework?”

In our Community of Practice, we have opportunities for people to share documents, and post resources in a shared folder. People can take these resources and use them in their own districts. So Community of Practices I think are an important part of AASA’s efforts and project work, since they allow us to reach a broad number of districts all together at once. 

Our Community of Practice met in Charlotte, N.C., in March 2016. We brought our group of diverse districts together—people from Texas, Virginia, Florida, New York, Iowa, and Georgia— and we had a really great meeting, focused on this one topic. That’s another thing that I think is useful for AASA efforts with Communities of Practices—that they are able to come in and focus on one issue area. As I said before, [superintendents’] jobs are multi-faceted and have a lot of different avenues that they need to oversee. When we come together in a Community of Practice, we were really clear, really focused on what they are going to tackle, and that they were able to have some time and have some space to work with their peers in an issue- in this instance, Professional Development Redesign. 

We had a really engaged group in Charlotte, N.C. We’ve met since virtually, and will continue to meet virtually throughout the year. We’ll bring the group back together again in 2017, in person, to hear what they have done in their districts, and how things have changed, hopefully for the better. 

How has the Community of Practice evolved since the iPD initiative was first introduced?

We originally sought to build a Community of Practice of 20 districts. We actually have 22 districts, because we had some people who just wanted to join—they heard about it through our governing board and other areas. So it has evolved by growing a bit. We have also have found ways to have [ the districts] make commitments to each other.

In our meeting in March 2016 in Charlotte, N.C.  one of the things we did was reevaluate what they were committed to do over the next year, which is important not just to brainstorm and problem solve together, but to really commit when they get back to their district. [We want them] to commit one or two key strategies that they feel will make a difference to professional development in their district. We’re looking forward to following up and holding each other accountable around how these districts have taken the challenge to redesign professional development in their districts.

How do you know if this project is having the desired effect on its participants? 

Tracking the efficacy of professional development is a challenging question, because there are so many aspects to it

[These aspects include]: 

1. Is the professional development that you provide effective in having the teacher gain the skills that you sought to give them?
2. Is that teacher then able to implement those gained skills in the classroom?
3. The third and biggest question is: Is having an effective professional development where a teacher gains new skills and then implements those skills in the classroom having an effect on student learning? 

So if you are doing professional development on guided reading, does the teacher pick up the skills around guided reading in a 3rd grade classroom, can he or she implement those in the classroom, and does implementing guided reading help your 3rd grade reading scores improve and help students read better?

That is the goal of all the work that we do: To have student success improve across the grade spans, across all the contents.

So it’s a challenge, in terms of having all those areas to track and monitor. We are working with districts to work on ways to prove or track the effectiveness of their professional development systems. 

We get a lot of feedback in each of the districts we work with from teachers about their professional development experiences, which I think is useful--how has that experience changed? Are they more engaged? Do they feel like they are learning and picking up more skills, do they self-report that they are able to work with those issues real time in the classroom? 

Tracking student success and learning is a longer term prospect, so it’s something that we’re working on. But we work with all of our districts to collect as much data as we can about how professional development is working. We will monitor that over the two years to see if there’s increases in student engagement, increases in self report of teacher confidence and skills, and hopefully we’ll be able to track some student achievement gains down the line as well. 

Is professional development starting to look different? 

Yes, I think AASA is just one part of a larger national conversation about professional development. I do think that the field is moving forward in a number of ways. Traditionally professional development was something that happened in the summer, maybe a couple of Saturdays throughout the year. 

What we learned is that it’s really important to still have these opportunities for people to meet in person a whole day during the summer or on a Saturday to [dive] deep into a topic, but it’s also important throughout the year to have some continuous contact about the topic, so that teachers aren’t waiting three months or six months before their next opportunity. 

So you’ll see professional learning communities or a Community of Practice in a school building where teachers have one day a week where they are able to get together across a content area and have a learning opportunity to talk about issues in the classroom, what’s working from the syllabus, what’s working from their strategic goals. That’s something you’ll definitely see changing—you’ll see more school embedded professional development, where teachers are able within the school day, at their school, to get developed with their peers, with their department chairs and principals about teaching practices, which is really great because you don’t want to have to wait until winter break to get a refresher on something, or to wait until winter break if something’s not working in the summer time. 

So it’s great for teachers to have these opportunities in the summer for big deep dives, but it’s also great for them to have smaller, more focused opportunities throughout the year to really refine and reflect on their teaching practices

Background: By 2015, the initial partner school districts completed an online tool called The Readiness Assessment Tool (found at predesign.org), which was developed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who funds this work.  

a. Can you describe what the Readiness Assessment Tool, for people who do not know what it is? 

All of our partner districts at this point have completed this Readiness Assessment. It’s a 30 question online tool, which assesses a systems professional development capacity across eight different areas. We like the tool a lot because it enables a district to quickly assess what are the strengths and weaknesses of their professional development system.

For example, one of the things the assessment tries to unearth is whether you have great content and tools, but maybe a poor delivery method to get them to teachers. Do you have a really great delivery method, a great platform, an online system to deliver professional development, but your content and tools aren’t as engaging as they could be? How engaged are teachers? How do the policies affect it? 

So there are eight areas that we look at from teacher engagement to professional development process, from data and deliverability infrastructure to high quality content and tools.  We go to each district after they completed the Readiness Assessment and facilitate a conversation with the superintendent, some cabinet and other folks to talk about what those strengths and weaknesses. It’s important we build on the strengths so districts know what’s working, rather than trying to change everything at once. And of course, whatever has been identified as an area of improvement, they can go and have deeper conversations about [those topics].  This assessment isn’t going to pinpoint you to exactly what’s wrong and what you can fix, but it is going to highlight some areas that were described as not working optimally for them. 

So for example, [this year, in 2016] in Palm Beach County, they had the central office group complete an assessment and they also offered the assessment to a different group [a group of principals and teachers]. We were able to compare how central office staff, which are delivering professional development and identifying needs, and are working to provide the summer sessions on PD, on how they felt professional development was working and then we were able to compare that to principals and teachers who are participating in and receiving the professional development, to see what they thought the strengths and weaknesses were in the district.

In Baltimore County, which also completed the assessment this spring, they did five different assessments of central office staff, three different high schools, which will be participating in a pilot, each had staff complete it. In almost all the districts, you’ll see the same strengths and weaknesses identified even across groups, which is a nice kind of confirmation of how there’s agreement among different constituents – whether its superintendent of the cabinet central office providers or whether its principals or teachers or students of specific high schools—that folks have agreement of what’s working and what’s not, and we’re able to point districts into a pretty clear direction about where they should leverage their strengths, and where they should spend some time investigating their weaknesses.  

b. What has been the response from the school system leaders who completed this assessment? How did this tool benefit them? Were there any challenges with using the tool? 

The general response has been great; our superintendents really appreciate the conversation that comes out of it. I always say that the tool itself is going to give us some data points. you know… you are going to get a 2.5 average in teacher engagement. Yet it’s not really about that number, since the number isn’t particularly meaningful, it’s about the conversations around it. [All 30 questions in the assessment are rated from 1 to 4].

[For example] what does it mean if we want to be at a 4 and folks are giving us answers that are closer to 2? What does it mean if we’re scoring really high in leadership capacity, but not in PD process and how do we fix those things? 

So I think the response from school system leaders has been that the conversation that comes from the data, really benefits them—to hear folks talk about it through, to think about it out loud and have a facilitated conversation about why those strengths and weaknesses may have been identified and where we can go next from there.  

There haven’t really been any challenges, I mean it’s an online tool that we invite people to, so there’s always some technical issues with people trying to get on or with their login, [things like that]. 

c. What was it like to work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation when using their tool? What was that dynamic like, considering they are funding the work?  

The Foundation has always been very supportive of AASA identifying which tools and resources we want to use with our districts. There’s no pressure to use this tool- this tool is a free and open resource to all districts that want to use it. You don’t have to be working with AASA or a Gates funded district to use it.  We use it because we find it to be a useful starting point for working with our districts. We like to get a baseline of where the district is, so we can get the district get where they want to go.  

The Foundation did put the funding behind the development of that tool, which was funded by a number of funded parties. But there’s no pressure to use it from them to us. We require our funded districts to use it because AASA has made that choice. We don’t require all our Community of Practice districts to participate in it, but they are all welcome to.

So the dynamic has been very easy, because the Foundation when they fund us, they support our decisions to work with the districts in ways we think will be most effective to move professional development redesign forward. We’ve chosen the readiness assessment as of the things that will help us do that successfully. 

How do you hope iPD will evolve over the next year? [since it’s funded until 2017) 

We’re excited about our next year of work. We’ve got our four districts really hard to implement some specific strategies in each of their districts. We’ve got our Community of Practice, which is coming together every quarter to share resources across districts. We’re excited to see how many districts can move the ball forward on Professional Development Redesign. We’re excited to see which pilot districts hold up as being really successful, and sometimes we can learn from ones that weren’t really successful either, to get a sense of what’s working and what’s not, as districts try to implement. 

In 2016-17, we’ll see a greater number of implementation, which we’ll be able to evaluate and talk to our Community of Practice on and our 4 districts about, so we can identify for other AASA members across the country what we’ve seen work and maybe provide some lessons learned and shortcuts. [That way] they don’t have to stumble in the same ways that other districts do.