The uncertain financial landscape of public education is forcing school leaders to rethink how to best allocate professional development dollars. "Lead like an entrepreneur" might well be the subtitle of this new playbook.
Six years ago, I was recruited to be an assistant superintendent in a large, suburban high school district and charged with expanding high-quality professional development for all teachers. Many educators were hired that year into a district known for its ample resources to support teaching and learning. Unfortunately, a month into my tenure, a multimillion dollar deficit required the release of many teachers and the elimination of budget line items, including funds allocated for staff development.
Not willing to give up on the district's mission of doing whatever it takes to improve teaching and learning, we began to investigate the real meanings behind some of our districtwide catchphrases, like "Teachers Leading Teachers" and "Getting Different to Get Better." How could we support those values with the few dollars left to us that year? In hindsight, the experience was a blessing. It forced us to reengineer some age-old structures and expectations and to discover strategies for providing high-quality professional development (PD), despite our financial barriers. Here are some of the creative solutions we developed.
Our Schools as a PD Hub for Local Districts
Even though we are not champions of drive�by workshops, we occasionally want to bring an expert in to provide training for teachers.
We publicize these workshops to area school districts and allow them to purchase individual seats for a fair price. This helps us offset our costs and provide the training at little or no cost to our employees.
Partnering with Vendors
Our budget crisis taught us to aggressively seek partnerships with PD vendors. Because we are situated near an airport and a commuter line, within reach of numerous hotels and restaurants and within striking distance of beautiful Chicago, we are attractive—particularly during summer months—to PD groups hungry to use our school sites to host large trainings. Again, our staff receives training at little or no cost, while vendors advertise their workshops and fill seats with educators across the nation.
Partnering with Area Universities
Our previous university partnership was plagued by a tradition of short courses on nonessential topics and a focus on delivering salary-lane credit to teachers rather than deliberate instructional goals. Our financial crisis enabled us to regroup and refocus our offerings. We partnered with a local university to offer credit to teachers for courses we designed around instructional strands critical to school and district priorities. Courses cost teachers $100 per credit hour and are led by our teacher leaders (each possesses a master's degree relevant to the course she is teaching and has received clearance from the university to be an instructor). In this new partnership, teacher courses are approved by the university but developed and delivered by the district. Our comprehensive program of course offerings reflects real district needs: assessment literacy, cooperative learning, questioning strategies, differentiated instruction, problem-based learning, and a variety of Google Apps for Educators courses. We're promoting growth in the areas that matter most to us.
Developing and Training Teacher Leaders
As we recovered from our deficit, we invested our profits into training our teacher leaders and expanding our instructional coaching model. This investment accelerated our shift to a professional learning communities model of professional development. Now, we have the homegrown capacity to deliver just-in-time PD by teachers, for teachers, and in a variety of formats.
We celebrate and communicate often and loudly the value we place in teachers earning these credentials. According to Google, we have more Google-certified trainers in our school district than anywhere in the world. In the summer, we offer "train-the-trainer" sessions for outside paying customers. We work closely with the fathers of cooperative learning—Roger Johnson and David Johnson—and have perhaps more cooperative learning teacher trainers than most districts. Using cooperative learning and action research, these teacher trainers help us support professional growth beyond initial experiences in workshops and training environments.
Through entrepreneurial leadership, we realized we could reach our goals by finding innovative ways to invest in our most valuable assets: our teachers!