How schools work toward professional development

Professional development (PD) in a nutshell is “ … a way that you continue developing your knowledge and abilities after you’ve met the baseline requirement for a position.” (Aguilar and Cohen) At Washington School, planning for professional learning is driven by a team of five classroom teachers, one instructional coach, and two administrators. We continually ask ourselves several key questions in planning learning for our colleagues:

In addition to considering the questions above in planning, our team also focuses on three beliefs about professional learning:

First, as professionals, we can learn a great deal from each other through sharing our practice during collegial conversations. We agree with Jim Knight’s assertion: “Our schools are only as good as the conversations within them.” Therefore, we use a process called “Tabletalk” during various professional learning times to do the following:

Second, high-impact instruction strategies are those that can make the biggest difference in student learning. John Hattie suggests trying strategies with higher effect sizes to gain bigger impacts on student learning. High-impact strategies do the following:

Third, we learn most deeply by putting it into practice — taking the learning from theory to practice in the daily reality of our own classrooms. We created an inventory document this year, where we share a variety of strategies, the situation we used them in, and the degree to which they worked. We continue to add to that document as evidence of our use of high-impact strategies. In addition, we curate many strategies we’ve explored, used, and discussed over the last seven years in the WHS Instructional Playbook.

We value the time dedicated to professional development, because we strive for learning, collegial conversation, reflection, and results — and these things are most possible during our professional learning time together.