Should We End Teacher Inservice?

Recently, the Center for American Progress, a left leaning think tank organization, did some really good analysis on how school day irregularities affect working parents and the economy. The study rightly points out that school hours and working hours misalign, causing child-care headaches and employment issues for parents. They advocate for expansion of afterschool programs and better scheduling. They also advocate this:

Districts should stop the practice of full-day school closures for professional development. Instead, they should utilize high-quality professional development strategies that can be embedded throughout the school day, including teacher collaboration and planning time, individualized coaching, classroom observations, evaluations from outside experts, and trainings on data analysis. Districts could also run citywide leadership development events during nonschool hours. They could also explore the use of online platforms, such as Knowledge Delivery Systems, for professional development and professional learning among educators, which would reduce the need for full-day closures for these purposes.

Motivate Youth provides individualized coaching designed to run concurrently with the school day, not necessarily because it creates less inservice days, but rather because it is the most effective way to deliver professional development. Many schools, however, do not provide professional development during inservice days (they often supply it is small chunks afters school, or allow teachers to find their own development on weekend or summer days.) If schools are using inservice days to provide professional development, they should look toward embedded development programs because they are the most effective. Inservice days, then could be eliminated, or used to do large reorganization and planning projects that require full day, full team participation.

Why We Work With Principals and Adminstrators

Many organizations provide professional development and consulting to teachers in an effort to improve classroom learning. Motivate Youth, however, goes beyond this and focuses on working with administrators and principals, whose continuing development is often overlooked. Interestingly, this is also a focus of the George W. Bush institute, who has commissioned studies evaluating the impact of effective principals. Here are some of their findings:

• Principals may account for up to 25 percent of a school’s impact on student learning. Among school-related factors, principals are second only to classroom teaching when it comes to impact on student learning. In fact, a 2013 Education Next report found that “highly effective principals raise the achievement.”
• A principal’s impact is even greater in high poverty schools. The impact on achievement can be even greater in schools serving disadvantaged students, according to the same article above, which means it’s even more crucial to attract and retain high-quality principals in schools where the need may be greatest.
• Highly effective principals can increase student scores by up to 10 percentile points in just one year. Research strongly suggests that principals are key to improving a school’s performance.
• 91% of teachers say leadership is key to improving student achievement. And effective principals recruit and retain effective teachers. Effective teachers – the most important in-school factor on a child’s educational success – tend to leave under ineffective principals, while poor quality instructors have been shown leave under high-quality school leadership.

Motivate Youth focuses on one key aspect of principal development: their ability to motivate teachers through assessment. Principals are under a lot of pressure to succeed, and that pressure often leads to strict, authoritarian, and intensely negative teacher assessments that discourage autonomy and personal growth. For teachers, this can be a motivation killer.

Instead, the best principals think of themselves as coaches, guiding teachers to adopt new strategies while respecting their input and autonomy. These coaching skills are rarely taught in any principal education program, so Motivate Youth is proud to step up and fill this critical need.

How Should Teachers Get Their Professional Development?

For a few years now, Motivate Youth has provided professional development for teachers and youth workers in a very typical way. We go to conferences or to individual organizations and give presentations. There are slideshows. There are stories of success. We do interactive activities and problem solving. Questions are asked and answered.

By the end of the day, teachers go home with a few new tools in their toolbox. It helps teachers a little, but is it enough? Is this the most efficient way to provide professional development? The center for public education has several key findings:

• The largest struggle for teachers is not learning new approaches to teaching but implementing them.    

• In order to truly change practices, professional development should occur over time and preferably be ongoing. 

• Coaches/mentors are found to be highly effective in helping teachers implement a new skill. 

The full report features cited research and makes an excellent argument. Professional development is most effective when it happens in their work environment, and is ongoing. This is one reason why Motivate Youth has a new focus on consulting. We want to train teachers and administrators where they work, integrating our expertise with theirs. Motivate Youth consultants are experts in motivation strategies, but teachers, principals and youth workers are the experts on their schools and their students.

In our effort to help teachers be their best, the professionals at Motivate Youth will act less like professors, and more like coaches. We think it's a strategy that can make lasting change.