Building a Culture of Continuous Professional Learning

Laura Coaxum, Director of Professional Learning, Eanes ISD

Laura Coaxum, Director of Professional Learning, Eanes ISD

I, like many other educators, have always believed in the concept of lifelong learning. It started at an early age, as a young child in elementary school, and I carried that passion for learning with me into the classroom as a teacher. As I shifted into an administrative role, I quickly learned that getting buy-in for any professional learning was essential. I remember the first PD session I led, which was met with groans when I started with an ice breaker. It was then that I really started leaning on relationships to move initiatives forward. I’ve found that if you truly care about student outcomes and growing teachers, and can authentically convey that to them, you can accomplish a lot. I’ve never met a teacher who truly did not want to learn anything new or grow; however, the way that each teacher wants to approach that learning is not the same. We constantly ask teachers to learn their students’ interests and adjust their instruction to meet their needs, and I strive to approach professional learning in that same manner.

Professional learning cannot be a one-and-done model at any level of your organization. Whether you are focusing on teachers, paraprofessionals, or administrators, districts need to explore structures that allow professionals to learn a new skill and then build upon that skill. I think it’s essential to think about structures for professionals at all levels in the district. In a time of budget cuts and shortfalls, we have to consider what structures and personnel we already have that we can leverage. If instructional coaches are available to support teachers, how can we maximize their impact? For example, thinking through how their time is used and measuring the amount of time they are spending in the classroom with teachers as opposed to doing administrative tasks is a great place to start. If instructional coaches aren’t available, how can you identify teacher leaders and then leverage those individuals to help support and grow others on campuses? Could you get creative with scheduling and offer an additional planning period to those highly effective teachers who can be used for on-the-job coaching of their colleagues? The same applies to thinking about supporting Paras. It’s one thing to provide training on how to respond to a student with escalating behaviors, but it’s another to be alongside them as they are living this on a campus. Who can be there to support them? One group that is often overlooked but, in my opinion, essential for job-embedded coaching is campus administrators. If we want to model lifelong learning, why would it be that once you become a principal, you no longer need that coaching? Identifying staff who can be there with your administrators when they are coaching teachers, responding to a crisis, or meeting with a parent is another structure that needs to be considered and planned for. Prioritizing time for your principal coach(es) to be on campuses and scheduling that time before the business of the year sets in is essential. These coaches, no matter the individual they are coaching or their job title, are the key to continued success. Having someone to follow up on the learning and be able to apply it to the individual’s context is the key to getting learning to stick.

“Accelerating student growth relies on our teachers in the classroom and their effectiveness.”

Time is typically the number one challenge when it comes to professional learning. Carving out and prioritizing that time before the school year starts is essential. If you wait until the school year gets going, you will never find the time, as competing demands will take over. From the district level, building time into the calendar that is protected for professional learning sets the campuses up for success. Being strategic about the placement of those days is critical. Being able to give some just-in-time learning at the point in the year where teachers can turn it around and apply it in their classroom right away can only happen if those PD days fall in the right spot. At the campus level, having an intentional master schedule that allows for collaborative time for teachers is a factor that can make or break your ongoing professional learning. If teachers’ only time to collaborate with their colleagues through a formal or informal structure is after school, the likelihood of that happening frequently is low. The more common planning time you can achieve through master scheduling, the more likely you are to see teachers collaborating and learning together.

As a principal, I focused on small group reading instruction after reviewing some campus data that highlighted reading in the primary grades as an opportunity for growth for us. My initial approach to this was to purchase a resource that was focused on targeted small group reading instruction, train staff on how to use the resource, and then go into classrooms and monitor for use of the resource. The problem with this was that I never took the time to figure out why small-group reading instruction hadn’t been happening. I had been in enough classrooms to know that there was a lack in knowledge of how to group students and what might be the most effective strategies to use, but what I hadn’t seen was the skill gap in managing small group instruction in the classroom. As I was monitoring for compliance with the initiative, I was not seeing the program being done with fidelity. While the resource and training helped with a part of the problem, it did not solve the problem because there was an entire component (management) that I had not addressed. Once I had a better scope of the challenge the teachers were facing, I was able to adjust my approach. I built in additional training, including videos of another teacher in the district running small group instruction, learning walks, and modeling in classrooms on how to manage the time. Only once teachers understood how to manage the classroom could they implement high-quality small group reading instruction.

John Hattie’s research on effect size told us the most critical factor in student outcomes is the teacher in the classroom. Accelerating student growth relies on our teachers in the classroom and their effectiveness. I would love to see some hyper-targeted embedded instructional coaching occur to grow our teachers and improve student outcomes. This would be intensive support that is directly linked to student achievement data, focused on high-leverage instructional strategies. These would be coaching cycles that occur at a quicker rate, looking for change in a smaller window of time than a traditional coaching cycle. This allows teachers to get immediate feedback and make changes right away. Student outcomes are the indicator for focus, along with the success criteria. Too often our staff are overwhelmed but the number of new initiatives they must learn and apply each year. Things are thrown at them during summer or back-to-school PD sessions, then not discussed again for months, or maybe even ever. This is not only ineffective and overwhelming, but contradictory to a culture of continuous learning. Having a strategic plan that allows for multi-year focuses that build upon one another allows staff to focus on one component at a time and learn that piece well. My advice is to identify your focus area and then model for campuses a rollout that is intentional and cyclical. Plan for every stage of the process, from the initial learning to defining how you’ll know when you’ve hit your goal. It also shows staff that we care about the outcomes from the learning, rather than checking a box to say we did it. Establish structures that you can utilize to support ongoing learning and model that beginning with your central admin team. Professional learning has to be a team effort, and not just fall on one person, department, or campus. When our teachers see that the learning is thoughtful, intentional, and prioritized, you’ll be amazed at how quickly your culture around PD can shift.