New Directions in Capacity Building

A dramatic shift is taking place in the world of professional learning in education as school districts reconsider how to improve teacher performance.

Buzzwords that once applied to student learning — personalization, blended learning, student-led instruction — now are shifting to the professional development realm.

At the same time, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act specifically moves districts away from the old “sit-and-get” standard offering to professional development that is job-embedded, evidence-based, collaborative and sustained. It discourages workshops that take teachers out of their classrooms for instruction when they lack a direct connection to their practice.

A Redesign Project

As professional development evolves, school district leaders are rethinking where and how to spend their scarce dollars to improve teacher practice. Nationally, districts spend about $18 billion annually on professional development in K-12 education, but much of that may be going to waste. A 2015 report from teacher-training organization The New Teacher Project found no link between improved teacher performance and professional development.

“For too long, professional development has just been compulsory, and it was not changing practice and impacting student learning,” says Bryan Joffe, project director of education and youth development at AASA. “It must be innovative, fresh and engaging to develop people into better teachers and better leaders.”

To that end, AASA is working with a group of 22 innovative districts in a community of practice to redesign professional development. Superintendents meet in person once a year and then three times a year through videoconferencing to learn from each other and share fresh ideas and best systemwide practices.

Here are highlights from the efforts of four districts, providing a glimpse into the evolution of professional learning.

Palm Beach County School District, West Palm Beach, Fla.

Superintendent Robert Avossa is just starting an overhaul of professional development in Palm Beach County, a district with 183,000 students and 12,000 teachers. But it’s a familiar process. He instituted similar initiatives in two other districts.

Avossa’s model gives teachers a strong voice in choosing their training, while striking a balance among teacher-led or self-directed development and district- and school-led professional learning.

To keep it all teacher-relevant, Avossa meets quarterly with a group of 150 teachers to talk about professional development offerings and to collect feedback on district proposals. Often, he says, the teacher feedback leads to tweaks or modifications by the central office in the lineup of trainings.

For all of this, Palm Beach has moved away from hiring outside experts by internally tapping into district staff and their expertise. “We’re finding our own talent and our PD is being led by our own teachers and principals,” he says.

But he’s not doing this in the dark. Avossa relies heavily on data to determine the type of capacity building needed. When testing showed 3rd-grade reading scores were not satisfactory, for example, the school district sought out training on literacy in pre-k through 2nd grade. “We let data drive what our PD menu looks like,” he says.

He’s also using data to analyze district spending on professional learning. In the last three years, Palm Beach County spent between $7 and $10 million annually for substitutes to fill in for teachers while they were out of the classroom for training activities. The average district teacher misses 14 days of school per year, about half due to professional development. “You lead with those numbers and they are shocking to people,” Avossa admits.

The superintendent, who moved to Palm Beach in 2015, instead plans to return some of those dollars to schools and allow them to decide the best way to support teachers — a process just beginning. In his previous superintendency in Fulton County, Ga., some schools used that money to hire full-time internal staff coaches. Other schools tapped teachers still in the classroom to cut down on their instructional duties and share that teacher-leader position.

“We need to empower the teachers and leaders of the school to develop their own ideas and strategies to solve the problem,” he said. “If they create it and develop it, they’re going to make sure it works.”

Lake County School District, Tavares, Fla.

The spark that inspired changes in professional development at Lake County Schools in central Florida started with a grant application aimed at improving student achievement, says Superintendent Susan Moxley. She and colleagues brainstormed about individualized learning playlists for students and personalized instruction. Then they thought about applying the same theories to inspire teachers’ professional growth.

“When you own your own learning, you will be more productive and you will change your practice for the better,” Moxley says. “We needed to focus on the teacher practice that gets the student outcomes we want.”

This year the district, with its 41,000 students and 3,000 teachers, is honing in on personalized learning through a system of microcredential “badges” that teachers and other staff, including counselors and instructional personnel, can earn. Lake County’s program allows instructional staff to choose areas for concentration as the paths they want to follow toward mastery.

The badges will be available in 13 areas, such as personalizing the learning environment or providing targeted feedback to students. Earning three master badges can contribute to a distinguished badge qualification. These micro-credentials also can contribute to requirements needed for recertification, Moxley says.

In the microcredentialing process, teachers will be able to meet the criteria in a face-to-face setting, in an online class or in a blended course.

“We learned from our students that not everyone wants completely independent learning and some still want face-to-face,” says Moxley, Lake County’s superintendent since 2008.

Like other school leaders, Moxley keeps an eye on the bottom line. Through direct support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the district took a granular look at its operating budget with Moxley vowing to scrap programs that had little impact. Now the district leadership knows exactly how much their professional development costs and what to expect in outcomes. As new forms of training unfold, the district will be scrutinizing student proficiency measures, interviewing teachers about professional development and conducting case studies, she says.

“We had been doing professional learning activities for years without a clue how to measure whether they made one ounce of impact in the classroom,” Moxley says. “We are very much looking for a return on investment.”

Kingsport City Schools, Kingsport, Tenn.

Professional development in the Kingsport City Schools no longer means teachers spend much time away from their students. Professional learning in the district must be collaborative and uber-relevant to what the teacher does every day.

“We believe professional learning should be job-embedded to the absolute extent possible,” says Lyle C. Ailshie, superintendent of the 7,100-student, 475-teacher system.

With only 13 school buildings, collaborative can mean both intra-school cooperation and learning, as well as cross-district interaction. The district has identified 70 teacher-leaders dispersed across academic disciplines, including literacy, math, technology, science and social studies. In 2016-17, the district is adding four instructional design specialists for another layer of expertise.

Kingsport has committed to giving teachers, particularly at the middle and elementary school levels, common planning time — typically 45 to 90 minutes per day.

“The research says a group of people are able to accomplish more than what you can do individually,” Ailshie says. “We think that has paid off for us.”

Kingsport, like Palm Beach County, is part of the AASA Community of Practice, which received $750,000 in funding over two years from the Gates Foundation to support the systemwide upgrades in staff training.

While the district may set an overall priority for professional development — for example, emphasizing oral reading — the teacher-leaders will set a more localized focus. They may conduct instructional rounds to determine exactly what teachers in a particular school or department need for improvement, though principals hold sway over what staff training is needed in their own school.

The district is so committed to school-generated professional development that a new district position was created this year to facilitate the training. The director of professional learning will coordinate planning and schedules, find resources and help professional activities bubble up from the school staff, Ailshie says.

This effort will help the district work smarter. Should several schools seek the same type of professional learning support, each won’t need to pursue its own program. Ailshie expects improvements in student outcomes, but says the administration is still crafting metrics to determine exactly what is working and how well.

“It all goes back to empowering teachers,” he says. “We believe our teachers are the experts, but we also provide them with a framework to work within.”

Jefferson County Public Schools, Golden, Colo.

In the 86,500-student JeffCo school district, leadership likes to use the phrase “flip the district.” While the slogan applies to many aspects of education there, it’s particularly apt around professional development efforts, says Matt Flores, the chief academic officer.

Some of those endeavors began with the district’s mathematics design collaborative and literacy design collaborative. These initiatives provide teachers in secondary schools with intense professional learning around standards adoption, though with skills training in areas the educators themselves see as valuable. Each school might choose a different emphasis or there might be a districtwide focus, says Marna Messer, director of choice programming.

Open to all 4,700 teachers in Jefferson County is a mini-grant opportunity that funds collaborative ideas. Teacher leaders in any subject are eligible for $2,500 grants to pay for materials tied to professional growth or release time for joint pursuits.

One problem the district faced was how to collect data on the existing professional development, Flores says. Currently, more than 800 teachers are participating in the collaboratives or the mini-grant program, up from the 45 involved in 2013-14. “We’re sending a bunch of people in many different directions,” he adds.

Messer created a tool that organizes all professional learning activities so the district can analyze trends across 3,000 data points. The leadership discovered, for example, 29 percent of teachers were asking for side-by-side planning, Flores said. JeffCo seeks ways to assess the effectiveness of its capacity building, even as it hopes that flipping of professional development is heading in the right direction.

“We go right to our customers — teachers,” Flores says. “We ask them what do you need and how can we help?”