Professional learning in a budget crisis
Three ways to provide high quality professional learning amid education budget cuts
Guest Contributor: David Brazer
When budgets tighten, teacher professional learning often gets cut. This jeopardizes high quality instruction, dampens teacher morale, and limits student learning. But just because cuts are coming doesn’t mean teacher professional learning has to suffer.
As a high school principal, district budget advisor, professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, and Director of Professional Learning at TeachFX, I’ve supported numerous school districts looking to sustain high quality instruction during budget shortfalls over my 40 year career in education.
Here are three ways that could help you provide excellent professional learning to your teachers on a much smaller budget:
1. Elevate teacher leaders
Budget cuts often impact your leadership team. You might lose a coach, an AP, or another staff member who has historically provided professional learning and instructional coaching to your faculty.
Now is the time to recognize the capability of your teachers and elevate those who can serve as teacher leaders. Principals who cultivate effective teacher leaders and let them take initiative greatly increase opportunities for improved instruction and student achievement. Principals working shoulder-to-shoulder with teacher leaders has the double benefit of improving motivation and morale while being cost effective.
Here’s what you can do as a school leader:
Affirm hard work and publicly recognize a job well done. There are few sentiments more powerful than gratitude and appreciation. Remember to say thank you.
Provide advancement opportunities, and be explicit about how you want to help accelerate the careers of your faculty members.
Give release time for leadership growth activities. Shadowing the principal and talking about leadership challenges, for example, helps a teacher learn how to lead teacher teams. That’s well worth the sub pay.
Have a teacher excited to implement something new? Encourage that initiative and let them run with it. Often, when we are implementing TeachFX, an enthusiastic teacher will be deputized by the principal to lead a cohort of her colleagues in reflecting on their teaching using the tool. That approach is far more effective than having the principal be “in charge,” and it’s a lot less work for the principal too!
Well-crafted workshops or “book clubs” on teacher leadership are also a good investment. (One of my personal favorites in the book category is Vivienne Robinson’s Student-Centered Leadership.)
As a school leader working on a tight budget, you need to give up the illusion of “control” and start thinking about turning your teachers into teacher leaders. The more people leading learning, the more learning happens.
2. Strengthen PLCs
Being part of a healthy and high-functioning Professional Learning Community provides critical support to a teacher — and at very low cost. Most districts already have some form of PLCs in place; they just rarely function well (Van Lare, Brazer, Bauer, & Smith, 2013). Often school leaders invest in costlier forms of professional learning because PLCs aren’t working to advance the school’s goals for better teaching and learning. When assessing PLCs, ask the following questions:
Are teachers treated like “professionals”?
Is teaching a job or a profession? Most PLCs function in a bureaucratic manner (Bauer, Van Lare, Brazer, & Smith, 2015). Teaching is seen as a “job” that can be routinized, and the PLC meeting is structured to be a form of “quality control.”
But teachers are not assembly line workers, and their PLCs should reflect that — helping teachers to deepen knowledge and capacity in their craft. A bureaucratic PLC involves none of the professional work of designing engaging classrooms that helps kids feel safe as they accelerate learning.
Is the focus on “learning“?
Teachers need to be learning in their PLCs, or else what’s the point?
PLCs are often dominated by discussion about the students. Who’s behind, who’s on track, who has what scores on what assessments, and who’s giving me a real headache this week? This can be helpful, but ultimately nothing is going to change until we consider what we’re going to do differently as teachers.
Teachers need evidence from their classrooms, time to reflect, and the support of colleagues to learn about good teaching and critical content, put good ideas into practice, and examine the results of their efforts. These behaviors are demonstrated in research as essential to teacher learning and improvement (Horn & Little, 2010; Little, 2003).
Teachers are not learning when they’re looking at the same assessment data over and over until their eyes bleed. They’re not learning by only asking what kids should do differently. Teachers learn by examining their teaching practices and asking how they can be better tomorrow.
Have teachers formed a true “community”?
A community is a place that allows for diversity of thought and all members have important contributions to make. Teachers’ learning communities should address the issues of greatest professional importance to their members.
Most PLCs are not true “communities.” Often teachers lack autonomy in PLCs. Or they’re asked to do a bunch of things during this time that aren’t really about developing their own craft. This is de-motivating.
Often the problem is simply too little time with your PLC (Bauer, Brazer, Van Lare, & Smith, 2013). How are you supposed to build a community with colleagues you only meet with once a month for 30 minutes?
When teachers do have a chance to collaborate in this way, the outcomes are real (Seashore Louis et al., 2010).
Here’s what you can do as a school leader:
Provide focus. PLCs should be laser focused on teaching and learning. Ask teachers to analyze and act on evidence of what actually happens in their classroom. If what they see doesn’t meet their ideals of excellent teaching, challenge them to consider how their practice may need to change.
Help teachers collect evidence. It’s difficult to have a conversation about your teaching without specific examples to consider. Give teachers guidance about simple ways to collect evidence from their classrooms. Lesson plans and student work are a great start. Recorded audio or video clips allow for an even richer conversation. (My organization, TeachFX, makes it super easy to collect and gain insight from this type of rich evidence.)
Strip away the “homework.” Don’t ask teachers to use PLC time to create a testing schedule for their department. Teachers should be spending PLC time examining their teaching, and planning changes they want to make to their upcoming lessons and teaching practice as a whole.
Confer your trust. Treating teachers as professionals means trusting them to use their time productively. Don’t ask to see agendas for their next four meetings. As a school leader, you’re not there to create and enforce accountability mechanisms; you’re there to provide inspiration, support, resources, and guidance that helps teachers meet their professional goals.
Allocate ample time. Allow your teachers to meet in PLCs as frequently as possible, ideally once a week for at least an hour. Don’t schedule other events, either mandatory or optional, over PLC meetings. This time is sacred. It’s for teachers to come together in conversations about their craft.
3. Leverage technology
Instructional coaching is one of the most effective forms of professional learning, but it can be expensive. New technologies are creating opportunities for district and school leaders to expand coaching capacity even while districts are cutting budgets. Here are a few tech tools that can help schools provide better support to teachers with less money:
BetterLesson and edconnective provide instructional coaching virtually, and at a lower price point than in-person alternatives. Because these programs serve individual teachers or PLCs, they can flex easily with a district’s needs and resources.
KickUp gives districts better visibility into what professional learning teachers actually need, helping them direct limited resources more efficiently. In a recession, the last thing leaders want to do is spend money to provide unnecessary trainings or unwanted support. They also have free resources districts can leverage.
TeachFX allows teachers to record classes and get personalized feedback on student engagement and their use of high-leverage practices like open-ended questioning, wait time 1 and 2, metacognition, equitable engagement, mathematical discussions, engaging ELs, classroom management, and more. The technology uses artificial intelligence to collect and surface these insights, which can extend a single coach or instructional leader’s reach by 10–50X.
With fewer APs, coaches, or release time for teacher-coaches, technologies such as these will be critical to sustain high quality coaching and professional learning.
Every school and district leader has difficult choices to make with looming budget cuts. By elevating teacher leaders, strengthening your PLCs, and leveraging technology, you can deliver high quality professional learning even in the worst budget environments.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or additional ideas — I’d love to be a thought partner: dbrazer@stanford.edu.