Page 10 - Leadership Matters monthly magazine template January 2013

10
As we ring in 2013, it’s already
time to start planning for the
2013-14 school year, so I
would offer for your consideration one over-
arching resolution for the New Year: Develop a
professional development plan for your staff.
The challenges facing superintendents at this
time of year are pretty daunting, including such
things as:
• Making school finance predictions
• Determining staffing and student
enrollment levels
• Making facility renovation or building plans
• Trying to figure out how to cut
transportation costs
• Starting or tweaking a district strategic
plan
• Finalizing curriculum plans for the coming
year
• Determining how you will communicate the
ISBE Climate Survey results to your Board
and community
• Planning how to deal with some
prospective new school board members,
and a whole variety of other issues.
But don’t forget about professional
development. It can lay the foundation for
addressing the issues facing school districts.
Full implementation of the teacher
performance evaluation process is right around
the corner, and I believe that this implementation
could be the most challenging personnel and
collective bargaining processes you will deal with
in your entire career. There already have been
more strikes and strike threats this school year
than in the last several years, probably because
of two main factors: lack of money at the district
level, and conversation about changing the
teacher performance evaluation system. This will
only get more contentious as we get closer to the
2016 deadline for full implementation.
The Illinois Education Research Council and
the University of Chicago recently released a
study titled “Designing and Implementing the
Next Generation of Teacher Evaluation Systems:
Lessons Learned
From Five Case
Studies in Five
Illinois Districts.” This research study pointed out
four specific challenges. Those challenges and
our recommendations to address them include:
1.Cultivating Buy-In and Understanding:
Bring in an outside consultant to start a process
to train your teachers on the Danielson
Frameworks for Teaching. You could do this
training with your own staff, but we have found
that an outside consultant’s training often is
received better than in-house training. IASA
offers this as a service to school districts as does
the Consortium for Educational Change (CEC). In
addition to training for teachers, IASA offers the
services of a consultant to sit down with the
district Joint Committee as you discuss
implementing and approving the teacher
evaluation plan and process.
2.Using Evaluations for Instructional
Improvement: IASA offers a workshop titled
“Coaching for Evaluative Purposes.”
Administrators need training in conducting
reflective and coaching conversations with
personnel they supervise. Principals will need to
conduct these conversations with teachers, and
superintendents will need to conduct
conversations with principals. IASA will provide
this training by a master coach with workshops
scheduled to begin in the spring of 2013 and
continue through the summer.
3.Reducing the Burden on Principals: IASA
plans to offer a one-day training seminar on
incorporating lessons learned from the Wallace
Foundation on effective use of principal time.
4.Incorporating Student Growth into
Teacher Evaluation Systems: IASA is teaming
up with the Value Added Research Center
(VARC) and the Illinois Association of Regional
Superintendent of Schools (IARSS) to offer
training for student growth and to also develop a
plan of action for your school district. This training
will consist of a half-day introduction into the
(Continued on page 15)
New Year’s resolution:
How about professional
development for staff?
Dr. Richard Voltz,
Assoc. Director
of Professional
Development