As educators, most of us believe if we demand greatness from our students, they will rise to meet our expectations. We have seen this happen time and time again. Our students are tenacious. They have grit. With the proper support, they are capable of anything. Why, then, is it so difficult to create structures that have the potential to elevate our teachers to this same level of greatness? Just like our students, teachers deserve to be set up for success. Unfortunately, it took my school four years to realize that new teachers, including myself, did not have to feel completely overwhelmed. We were asking our teachers to expertly lead blended-learning classrooms, integrate technology, track student data, and build a culture of care and compassion every day. We were asking them to be great, but we weren't supporting them in this mission.
Realizing this gap helped us consolidate our professional development vision around two ideas: (1) We need to train our teachers the way they will ultimately teach, and (2) we need to expect the same greatness of our teachers that they expect of their students.
Train Teachers How You Want Them to Teach
How can we expect teachers to differentiate classroom instruction if we don't differentiate teacher professional development (PD)? When we realized our PD practices did not reflect our expectations for teacher practice, we went stepped back and undertook to develop different pathways for teacher PD. With these "paths," new teachers spend more time building a strong foundation in the basics—first learning how to navigate our many systems and structures, and then mastering backwards planning and classroom rigor. Meanwhile, veteran teachers can opt out of certain sessions and deliverables and, instead, explore topics that push their practice, such as providing student choice in the curriculum or creating caring yet accountable classroom communities.
Additionally, teachers new to our campus attend a one-day orientation workshop. During this session, school leaders introduce them to the core concepts of our instructional model through online modules and provide them with live data and feedback on their progress as they complete various PD tasks. This approach models the blended and feedback-rich learning environment we expect our teachers to create, and we find that when our teachers learn using the same process as our students do, this familiarity helps them generate more appropriate ideas and solutions in the classroom. This results in fewer overwhelmed educators and more successful ones.
Expect Teachers to Be Lifelong Learners, Too
We expect our students to remain thirsty for knowledge; to tap into the deepest levels of critical thinking and stay curious. If we want this disposition in our students, we need teachers who embody this passion for lifelong learning. We developed our Master Teacher PD Series to sustain and nurture our teachers' drive for constant improvement and growth. For this series, we asked our most effective teachers to take advantage of PD opportunities off campus, and then return to share their knowledge with their colleagues at school. Over the course of this academic year, we have sent 12 educators—nearly half of our faculty—to conferences (including ASCD Empower18 in Boston) across the United States.
Yes, this requires a bit of budget creativity. Perhaps more importantly, however, it requires each educator at our school to reflect on a desired area of growth, both individually and holistically in terms of the needs of our school, and then identify a conference and specific sessions that align with those goals. Teachers return with tangible ways to improve themselves and each other, disseminating newfound knowledge to our entire staff during 90-minute debriefing sessions. So far, our inspiring teachers have enhanced our school through this process more than my principal and I alone ever could on our own. They have developed ways to track our students' socio-emotional growth, identified efficiencies that allow teachers to spend less time grading, found ways to align performance tasks more closely to real-world experiences, and more.
Today, our teachers enter our building in the fall with a momentum that continues throughout the year. By retooling teacher development to mirror the learning environment we create for students, we have unlocked our teachers' drive to perform at their highest levels, while supporting them with targeted resources. By expecting our teachers to be just as hungry for new knowledge as our students, we have tapped into our faculty's passions. I am proud of the shift we have made in preparing our teachers but, more importantly, I am proud of our teachers for working tirelessly to develop themselves, so they can further develop our students, our school is a better place for their curiosity and their drive.