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.
The following resources are designed to help academic leaders development of a robust talent management system that is driven by principles of teaching excellence. Use them to make informed decisions during the planning phase, inform the design and development of a coherent system, and support the ongoing work of implementation.
Principles of teaching excellence resource guide
Principles of teaching excellence reflect the aspirations and high expectations schools have for their teachers, and guide teachers in their efforts to meet and exceed these expectations.
Learn about three research-based frameworks of teaching excellence that your school can adopt and use our decision matrix to determine which framework best fits your school. Use this guide to facilitate a systematic approach to adopting principles of teaching excellence at your school. These principles should serve as a roadmap for developing a structured, coordinated approach to faculty development.
Hiring resource guide
Help your team develop a more systematic and coherent approach to the hiring process with this resource guide. Learn how to innovate on your existing hiring practices, conduct behavioral interviews in a consistent manner using our interview question bank, and build a standardized teaching observation rubric for assessing candidates’ teaching demonstrations.
Designing professional development to foster growth infographic
This one-page infographic will help guide the design of your professional development system to best support continuous faculty growth. This resource outlines the research-based characteristics of effective, high-impact professional development and includes a brief overview of Georgetown Day School’s in-house professional development model. More details about GDS’s approach can be found in this on-demand webconference.
Coaching resource center
Because coaching is a relatively new strategy for independent schools, we have developed several resources to support the introduction of instructional coaching. You can view them all in the resource center.
The art of focused feedback
Faculty are often not used to receiving frequent feedback and classroom observers or coaches do not always provide the most detailed, useful feedback. Use the FOCUS feedback method illustrated in this infographic to provide faculty with observations that are quick, clear, and actionable to improve their professional practice.
Guide to University Prep’s Individualized Teacher Improvement Plan
This guide provides an in-depth description of University Prep’s comprehensive system for continued faculty growth and evaluation, the Individualized Teacher Improvement Plan (ITIP). ITIP is an excellent example of what a thorough, intentional talent management system looks like, from recruiting and hiring to employment decisions. This system embodies the characteristics of effective professional development and supports teachers to grow in alignment with the school’s principles of teaching excellence.
Use this guide to learn about ITIP and how you can implement a similar system at your school. More details about University Prep’s ITIP can be found in this on-demand webconference.
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