Introduction
In order to complete this activity, I reviewed the NSDC’s Standards for Staff Development and my school’s published Mission Statement. I also asked about a formal Staff Development Plan but we don’t have one. I then considered my own peronal experiences as a faculty member and as an administrator who conducts Development sessions then interviewed VL, a Lower School Assistant Principal, NH, our Middle and Upper School Principal and several teachers, both veterans and newcomers. My findings were revealing and included several causes for concern but, at the same time, I discovered a number of things of which the school can be proud.
Findings
Alignment between the school’s staff development plan and a) research-based standards for staff development, b) the school’s vision/mission/goals, and c) the school improvement plan
As I stated above, the school has no formal development plan. That is not to say that members of the administrative team do not share a set of goals for staff development, they simply have not codified these plans into a unified document. Of course, having such a document is important for a number of reasons, foremost among them the fact that creating such a document is an important process that will force members of the team to reconcile their needs and feelings with the rest of the adminstrative team and reach consensus on a single set of goals.
The NSDC’s Standards for Staff Development state that schools should form Professional Learning Communities with goals aligned with the school’s mission. This has been done, though it could bear improvement. Currenlty, each school’s faculty (Lower, Middle and Upper) meets weekly for development. A significant portion of this meeting time is taken up with housekeeping details (schedule change announcements, new procedures, etc), but developent does occur. This is often planned in a scattershot way where, for example, one team might recieve training on a tool like electronic whiteboard software, while another team fills their session with horizontal team sessions on curriculum design while waiting for the whiteboard specialist to be available next week.
The teachers I interviewed shared contradictory messages with me. On the one hand, they identified the gap in their development and recognized that they weren’t “getting better enough fast enough” at their jobs (interestingly, both rookie and veteran teachers felt this way). However, every teacher I interviewed also resented the meeting time they were “forced” to endure, complaining that they felt their time was wasted after school when they “deserved” to be home after teaching a full day.
While I understand their feelings (and even shared them when I was a teacher), my current perspective as an administrator and student in this program changes my view quite a bit. The problem, I believe, lies not with the fact that the training occurs, but in the way it is planned and carried out, making the need for a formal Staff Develoment Plan even more urgent.
As a teacher, I was asked for lesson and unit plans by my principal. It is not unreasonable to expect the same from a school administration; this is all a Staff Development Plan is. Over and over again during this masters program, I have been struck by the similarities between the relationship a teacher has with students and the one an administraor has with teachers. In this case, the expectations flow in the opposite direction, but the principle is the same: students have a right to expect that a teacher has a plan… and teachers should expect the same thing from an administrative team is they are asked to give time over to professional development..