Targeted training: using data to avoid random acts of professional development

School Administrator, Dec, 2002 by Jane Sanborn

Think for a minute about how you selected the last workshop for teachers in your school or district. Which of the following statements best describes your preparation for the professional development activity?

* I selected it after a careful review of our achievement data to determine the training that could best address staff and students' needs.

* I read an article on the strategy and it sounded great.

* My first choice of workshop facilitator was already booked and I was under pressure to fill an in-service slot.

If your answer is anything but the first, you are missing your best opportunity to engage teachers as partners in strengthening curriculum and instruction in your schools.

Needs Analysis

Professional development coordinators consider a host of variables when they plan training initiatives, but a formal needs analysis has not typically been part of the picture. Increasingly, though, school systems are paying more attention to their data on student achievement. Savvy administrators analyze this information before they make decisions about finances, strategies for improving classroom practice and, just as important, the professional development they provide for staff members and faculty.

For many districts, the movement toward data-based decision making comes after realizing that random acts of professional development do not lead to sustained school improvement. If a district does not base continuing education decisions on careful examination of its data, then fads and good marketing campaigns are more likely to set the agenda. As a result, professional development activities may not be connected to improvement plans. If teachers don't immediately see the relevance of a workshop or seminar, they may be less motivated to try the proposed strategies in their classrooms.

Consider the experiences of districts that have tried to integrate academic and vocational-technical curricula. Many have hired expensive facilitators to lead workshops or sent teachers to conferences only to discover later that few if any teachers were implementing the concepts they learned. The lesson? Workshops are not enough.

All too often, districts provide a workshop on integrated curriculum (or some other improvement strategy) and neglect to plan for monitoring and further support. Administrators are then disappointed when they realize that teachers "ignored" the initiative and put the workshop binder on a shelf. Another common problem is administrators plan new activities for the coming year without reviewing the results of their past investments. Teachers roll their eyes and say "not another workshop" as the cycle begins yet again.

Some school districts are trying to break out of this endless loop by creating a culture of improvement based on assessing their own data.

The Pella Profile

The 2,130-student Pella Community Schools in Iowa is one such district. When Superintendent Mark Wittmer arrived in 1999, his first priority was to improve the district's student achievement. Test scores were good, but he thought they could be better. During that first year, Wittmer and his curriculum director, Lowell Ernst, came to understand that hard data would provide the building blocks for change.

"We had to know the criteria that would tell us we were making progress, Wittmer says. "And we had to get the right information into the hands of the people who needed it--the teachers."

The first step was to get away from an ad hoc professional development approach that led to one-time workshops on assessment methods or instructional strategies that may not have been research-based or particularly relevant to district goals. A successful shift toward data-driven professional development depended on the involvement of teachers from the beginning.

Wittmer, Lowell and Pella's six school principals established planning teams that included both teachers and administrators to address four key issues: assessment, research, staff development and technology. All teams collect, analyze and use data for planning, but the assessment team has the primary responsibility for the data system.

A key outcome of the team meetings was a profile that clarifies districtwide goals for student achievement and acts as an internal progress report. It continues to be the basis for all planning, especially professional development. The profile includes student grades and test scores by grade levels, attendance rates and other measures of behavior and performance. To complement the profile, Pella also produces standards-based report cards that show how well students perform against every benchmark.

Customized Approach

One important discovery that emerged from this planning process came through a review of data that looked inside classrooms. Teachers found overall class scores to be high, but they then had to "look at the micro, not just the macro," says Lowell Ernst, Pella's curriculum director. Their next step was to look within district, school and classroom test scores for evidence of students' performance in specific skill areas.