Putting comprehensive staff development on target

By Stephanie Hirsh

Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2004 (Vol. 25, No. 1)

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2004. All rights reserved.

Two years ago, NSDC began work with the Corpus Christi, Texas, school district to develop a comprehensive, standards-based professional development plan. When I began work on the project, I thought I knew what a staff development plan should include. By the time the project was done, many of my basic assumptions had changed.

I learned that an effective staff development plan cannot be written separately from a district or school improvement plan. Instead, professional development functions most effectively when it is embedded into the district or school plan and is seen as the primary strategy for achieving district or school goals.

School districts benefit when they have one comprehensive improvement plan that is supported by school improvement plans for each campus. Yet improvement plans will help students achieve higher standards only when the plans recognize that comprehensive professional development must be a supporting piece of the plan. And professional development planning must occur within the context of district and school improvement work.

Three essential qualities

Professional development planning focuses attention on how the system as a whole and individuals must change to achieve the district's goals. Rather than being outlined in its own plan, comprehensive professional development becomes a compilation of plans, each supporting different district and/or school priorities. These individual plans are most effective when they attend to what we know about effective professional learning and ensure that staff development is results-driven, standards-based, and focused on educators' daily work.

Results-driven

Many professional development efforts are organized as a smorgasbord of courses offered to educators. The district measures the effort's effectiveness by how many courses staff complete or how satisfied teachers are with the classes offered. District leaders who use the smorgasbord approach may view professional development as an extra that potentially helps an individual's performance but is not absolutely essential. They probably invest little in professional development planning because they don't expect great results.

Other district leaders recognize how much professional learning contributes to the district's learning goals for students, and so they align individual, team, school, and system learning plans. At each level, participants consider what outcomes they want for students, the knowledge and skills teachers need, and the professional learning that will help staff achieve the system goals.

To be results-driven means following Stephen Covey's advice (1989): "Begin with the end in mind." Once student outcomes are selected, professional development leaders identify the knowledge and skills adults need to help students achieve the district's standards of success. The knowledge and skills linked to the student learning goals become part of the comprehensive professional development curriculum.

Standards-based

Standards are an important part of our profession. Comprehensive professional development considers standards for students, teachers (e.g. state-required entry-level standards or those of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards), leaders (such as the standards developed by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium), and staff development.

Teaching and leadership standards offer a continuum of knowledge and skills, and this continuum can provide a direction for professional learning experiences. Staff development standards, such as those disseminated by states and those of the NSDC, describe the qualities of professional development associated with high-performance cultures.

The NSDC standards were revised by a group of representatives of the nation's largest education associations who reviewed research, discussed best practices, and reached consensus on the focus for the standards. The resulting standards describe what qualities of staff development improve teacher practice and student performance. They provide direction for planning, implementing, and monitoring staff development. Context standards outline what organizational factors support high-quality professional development. Process standards provide direction for improving educators' daily practice. Content standards address the knowledge and skills educators acquire through professional development.

Leaders improve their comprehensive district planning when they regularly review the standards and apply them. For example, Standard 4 of the NSDC Standards for Staff Development calls for using data to determine what learning staff members need. The standard also reminds leaders what kinds of data to consult in planning and reiterates the value of data at other points in the improvement process.

Focused on daily work

In too many schools, staff development is limited to teachers attending workshops, courses, and conferences. School districts can no longer afford staff development efforts that are predominately "adult pull-out programs." That kind of learning alone will not produce high-level results. Schools will achieve high levels of performance when professional learning is embedded in every school day.

Job-embedded learning means:

• Adults work in learning communities whose goals are aligned with school and district goals.
• The learning community uses disaggregated student data to set priorities for adult learning, to monitor students' progress, and to help sustain continuous improvement.
• The learning community uses research to make decisions and adopts strategies that lead to the desired changes in educator practice in order to achieve the goals for student learning. Professional development focuses on deepening educators' content knowledge, applying research-based strategies to help students meet rigorous standards, and using a variety of classroom assessments.

Seven guidelines

Most districts have a variety of goals. For example, a district may have student academic goals, parent involvement goals, and leadership goals for teachers and administrators. Each goal is supported by multiple strategies, and more than one of them often relate to developing staff members' knowledge and skills. Each strategy requires a staff development action plan, and developing a comprehensive, results-driven, standards-based staff development plan means compiling these action plans.

However, merely compiling the action plans into a single document does not produce a powerful plan. The comprehensive plan includes context (policies to guide system planning and operations); process (procedures for developing powerful action plans); and content (district and school action plans that outline what adults will learn and do to achieve their goals).

To develop and implement effective professional development action plans that work together effectively to produce the intended results, follow these seven guidelines:

1. Involve all stakeholders. Michael Fullan noted (2000) that for schools to achieve large-scale reform, educators and the public have to be committed to the system's success and believe that they have a stake in it. The NEA Foundation for Improvement of Education (2000) said building a collaborative vision of professional development requires that all stakeholders have purposeful and structured conversations. Stakeholders make important contributions to system-level improvement and staff development planning.

A stakeholder group specifically for staff development or a staff development team can develop professional learning action plans. Having a planning team knowledgeable and skillful in professional development ensures that district expectations are translated into action plans that produce desired outcomes. The team produces action plans, ensures that district policies and procedures are in place to support their implementation, and guides and supports the schools in their staff development work.

The planning team can offer observations, suggestions, and sometimes resources. System leaders should be part of the team since they hold the "big picture" that allows them to connect schools working on similar challenges. By identifying redundancies of effort among schools, district leaders can maximize efficiency. Schools can pool resources to accomplish a similar goal, network across subject areas so individuals can develop deeper content knowledge, and provide more opportunities for learning.

2. Focus on leadership development. The most important contribution a district planning team can make is to invest in developing leaders who understand quality professional development and how to facilitate it. System and school leaders make hundreds of decisions daily that have implications for staff development. A district team can have a significant impact if it invests expertise and resources in developing leaders who know how to build and carry out effective staff development plans at all levels.

3. Make explicit the theory of change. Joellen Killion and Dennis Sparks have helped staff developers become more accustomed to explaining the theory of change underlying a plan. Effective action plans are grounded in logical theories of change. Asking the team to clarify its theory of change (how each action plan will produce the results it seeks) and discussing the assumptions team members hold about that process increase the likelihood that the plan will achieve its goals. Killion (2002, p. 55) writes that a theory of change "... delineates the underlying assumptions upon which the program is based. It includes not only the components of a program, but also incorporates an explanation of how the change is expected to occur."

Sparks refers to an assumption as a view one holds to be true. When staff development fails to produce results, the underlying assumptions in the theory of change may be weak or the plans incomplete. For example, many district leaders still believe that simply giving staff good information is all that is needed to improve classroom practice. Their theory of change appears to be that a series of one-shot experiences or events will produce the desired results. Yet years of research and school reform efforts have taught us otherwise. Articulating and examining a theory of change may identify weaknesses in the implementation plan or strengthen support for the quality of the plan.

4. Emphasize the school and team level. Professional development that affects student and staff performance requires a school and team focus. Districtwide professional learning programs or individual professional development take the focus away from school and team learning. Too many district teams still spend time developing the district's catalogue of courses. They could make more powerful contributions if they spent time:

• Providing feedback on school improvement plans;
• Coordinating mentoring of new school and team leaders; and
• Helping school and team leaders develop skills (e.g. meeting facilitation, lesson study, peer coaching) necessary to advance school and team learning; and
• Assisting with formative and summative evaluations of staff development work.

Substantive change requires learning that occurs at the school level. Sometimes districts have legitimate reasons for convening large groups, such as a desire to send a single focused message or to work with a particular curriculum or group of employees. However, more staff development leaders must begin to think how learning delivered at the system level can be moved to the school and team levels.

5. Review and reflect on the research. The No Child Left Behind act calls for professional development grounded in scientifically based research. While there is little research in professional development that meets the federal government's standard for scientifically based research, staff development leaders have a responsibility to thoroughly analyze available research, literature about best practices, and other data before making staff development decisions and investing district and school resources.

The limitations of the current research also provide an opportunity. When research to support a program is unavailable, educators can conduct their own action research projects, collecting data and contributing to the body of scientifically based research on staff development.

6. Monitor progress. Anne Lewis (2001) writes, "Our challenge is to remain vigilant and to do so by continuously collecting and interpreting the information available on student achievement." Studying data at the system, school, team, and individual levels offers valuable information to help improve professional development and accomplish desired results.

A variety of data helps in monitoring and adjusting professional development. Useful data include:

• Participation levels in various initiatives;
• Implementation maps that describe the continuum of actions as teachers implement various initiatives;
• Classroom-based assessments teachers have developed;
• Meeting logs;
• Student activity reports; and
• District and state tests.

One tool to monitor the quality of professional learning at the school level is the NSDC standards self-assessment, which provides data on how teachers view the quality of professional learning at the school. Data collected over time enable the team to judge whether quality is improving. Specific results pinpoint where the school needs to make improvements. (See the NSDC standards self-assessment, online at www.nsdc.org/standards/about/selfassessment.cfm.)

7. Be an advocate for quality professional development. Staff development leaders have a responsibility to push for high-quality professional development. Without advocacy, support for quality staff development is often limited.

Being an advocate means knowing who has the authority to make decisions about professional development and outlining what decisions you want made. Advocacy and leadership can persuade a district to develop and adopt formal policies and to allocate the resources needed for professional development. In their role as advocates, district team members can encourage the district to adopt the NSDC Standards for Staff Development. Formally adopting the standards can help ensure that the standards drive all aspects of professional development planning and implementation.

Advocates also work to ensure that system leaders do not compromise when making decisions about staff development. Advocates are able to articulate how important professional development is to achieving school system goals.

Conclusion

High-quality professional development is essential for school systems to achieve their goals for student and staff performance. As M. Bruce King and Fred Newmann (2000, p. 32) observed, "A school's instructional capacity is enhanced when its programs for student and staff learning are coherent, focused on clear learning goals, and sustained over a period of time."

Effective, comprehensive professional development is about consistently applying quality processes, not about publishing a plan. Three lessons I drew from my experience in Corpus Christi are:

• Staff development is only as effective as the goals it is asked to achieve.
• For staff development to be most effective, it must be viewed as the key strategy for achieving district and school goals.
• Staff development as an isolated and/or fragmented plan produces isolated or fragmented results.

Districts that take their commitment to high levels of performance seriously view staff development as their primary strategy to achieve their goals. Staff development action plans are integrated through the district and school improvement plans, and effective processes ensure high-quality plans. This systematic effort produces staff development that is results-driven, standards-based, and focused on the daily work of educators.

References

Covey, S. (1989). The seven habits of highly effective people. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Fullan, M. (2000, January). The return of large-scale reform. Journal of Educational Change, 1(1) 5-27.

Killion, J. (2002). Assessing impact: Evaluating staff development. Oxford, OH: NSDC.

King, M.B. & Newmann, F.M. (2000, April). Will teacher learning advance school goals? Phi Delta Kappan, 81(8), 32.

Lewis, A. (2001). Add it up: Using research to improve education for low-income and minority students. Washington, DC: Poverty & Race Research Action Council.

The NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education. (2000, Fall). Engaging public support for teachers' professional development, no. 3. Retrieved Sept. 4, 2003 from www.nfie.org/publications/engaging.htm#case

About the author

Stephanie Hirsh is deputy executive director of the National Staff Development Council. You can contact her at 16306 Sunset Valley, Dallas, TX 75248, (972) 818-1450, fax (972) 818-1451, e-mail: NSDCHirsh@aol.com.