In the 2018 Independent School Executive Forum’s Executive Roundtable series, Building and Sustaining a Competitive Advantage, researchers shared best practice strategies in areas of enrollment management and faculty professional development.
This resource center is designed to take the insights and best practices from our research on faculty professional development, Keeping Faculty on the Leading Edge, and translate them into actionable change on your campus. Each tool or resource supports the implementation of a particular strategy, with the goal of helping schools create a robust system of professional development.
Professional development at independent schools has traditionally centered on conference attendance, in-service days and other on-campus workshops, and continuing education.
These activities are often selected based on personal interest or current education hot topics, with little grounding in an individual teacher’s opportunities for improvement or alignment to school-wide goals or priority areas. These activities also suffer from lack of follow-up, leaving teachers without much in the way of implementation support. But perhaps most problematically, professional development is rarely designed to help teachers attain an articulated standard of teaching excellence, in no small part because no such articulation exists. As a result, schools are beginning to recognize that their significant investment in professional development is not necessarily yielding impactful results.
Over the course of our research on professional development, we identified four opportunities for schools to improve their approach to professional development in order to elevate the level of teaching excellence across the school.
First, schools need to define and articulate teaching excellence at the school
This should be shared with faculty and used to structure all aspects of talent management across the school, such as recruiting, hiring, professional development activities, and more.
Second, schools should reconfigure their professional development programming to incorporate research-based elements of effective professional development
Specifically, schools should design active, collaborative learning opportunities to engage teachers in continual improvement and foster a culture of continual learning.
Third, schools should develop the capacity for high quality instructional coaching
Research indicates that coaching can have a tremendous positive impact on teacher performance, but is often notably absent from independent schools. Schools will need to create coaching capacity and ensure effectiveness by building a research-based coaching infrastructure.
Fourth, schools and teachers should be held accountable for continual efforts to improve
A well-designed talent management system includes accountability mechanisms tied to principles of teaching excellence and provides the necessary resources for teachers to improve.
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