The authors of the upcoming book, Invest in Your Best: 9 Strategies to Grow, Support, and Celebrate Your Most Valuable Teachers, share actionable strategies to help K-12 principals retain and support teachers now.

Watch this webinar to get key practices that you can try today to better retain and support your teachers.

The book explores nine practices but in this webinar, we focus on two: data-informed feedback and personalized professional learning. (To dig into all nine, grab your copy of Invest in Your Best on Amazon or at Bookshop.org.)

Why do the authors advise principals to invest in their best teachers?

Assistant principals, principals, and superintendents need new approaches to attract, retain, and support teaching staff so that they can thrive amid post-pandemic challenges.

Wouldn’t that mean providing every teacher with the same support?

The strategies presented here apply to every teacher but our authors find principals struggle to support their high-performing teachers.

When school leaders “invest in their best”, their teachers’ ideas, efforts, and work they do in their classrooms can scale schoolwide.

Invest is a critical word.

As a principal, you invest in the professionals you’ve trusted to make part of your team. It’s up to you to help each one become better. And when you raise up your teachers, you raise student achievement. 

Remember, a rising tide lifts all ships.

Your best teachers are the tide - and when you treat them as such, they'll lift the entire school.  

However, many leaders tend to adopt the “80/20 rule” - spending 80% of the time focusing on teachers who seem to need the most support and just 20% on those who could be the tide that lifts all boats.

By employing data-informed feedback and personalized professional learning, principals can support their teachers – including their best – in an effective way that honors their teachers’ time and is scalable throughout the school.

Data-informed feedback facilitates individual teachers’ growth with impacts that scale schoolwide

As Dr. Heather C. Hill shared from her research in our recent webinar, teachers both need and appreciate effective instructional feedback. 

Moreover, this feedback should be data-informed - non-evaluative, objective, and delivered as frequently as teachers need. (There's a reason why our authors have a whole chapter in their book dedicated to this.)

But in reality, teachers feel that the feedback they receive is subjective, is delivered as infrequently as once or twice a year, and seems evaluative (or is evaluative and connected to the larger evaluation set). 

What’s more, the data we usually ask teachers to focus on is test score data. However, studying lagging indicators doesn’t change teaching or learning.

Data-informed feedback is a leading indicator of learning. Teachers can see data-informed feedback on their practice and make changes the next day that will be meaningful for student learning outcomes. 

Data makes the feedback about the practice, not the person. Being able to separate the practice from the person creates space for vulnerability and openness. It creates space for teachers to get to the heart of the matter of what they’re doing in their classroom and what they want to do.

Whether looking at their data on their own, collaboratively in a PLC, or in a coaching conversation, the data is at the center rather than the person on the hot seat.

Every teacher benefits from feedback, even high-performing teachers. Feedback for these teachers often turns into some version of: “Keep up the good work.” Or, because you’re not an expert in their content area, it’s “I never taught band or music, so just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Our highest-performing and most engaged teachers grow through self-reflection. So, how will they continue to grow if we don't help them reflect?

Master teachers need feedback, and often, it's most valuable when it comes from other master teachers.

1. Set your focus and communicate it in advance. When you set your focus for gathering and analyzing data, you and your teachers know what you’ll be looking for. 

   This helps you know what to notice, observe, and record when you walk into their classroom. You're less distracted by what you might perceive as the high points or troublesome parts of the lesson.

2. Analyze what you see in the data together. Objective data doesn't make qualitative judgments or gets distracted by highs or lows - it simply shows what happens. If there were 45 minutes of teacher talk and three minutes of student talk, that’s what it will show. With objective data, you can see and celebrate together what really happened during that lesson and later decide together what goals to set to continue the growth.

3. Be consistent in fostering a culture of reflection. Gathering and delivering feedback has to be consistent and people have to understand why it's happening. 

4. Be more about coaching and less about evaluation. Taking out the evaluation piece removes the question of ‘Am I doing a good job?’ and reduces fear of what that might mean.

When feedback is data-informed, and focused on leading indicators of what’s actually happening in the classroom, it can be used to celebrate our teachers and their efforts, while facilitating their growth. It can support teachers’ self- and collective efficacy, empowering them to reflect on their own or do so collaboratively with each other.

Tools like TeachFX help remove the barriers that prevent you from providing teachers with frequent, objective, and non-evaluative feedback that fosters a culture of reflection and growth that can scale through your school.

Personalized professional learning honors teachers’ expertise while supporting their professional journey

According to TNTP, districts spend an average of $18,000 per teacher per year on PD. And teachers spend about 19 full school days per year in PD.

That's a significant amount of time taking teachers away from the main reason they're in the building – their students. So it had better be good, right?

But these efforts rarely, if ever, result in real changes in teaching practice (TNTP) - and principals and teachers alike doubt whether it's even all that effective (Gates).

Why are we doing this?

Look at it this way: how do we put into practice for our teachers, what we want our teachers to put into practice for our students? 

Connie recalls learning this lesson while working with a second-grade teacher who was teaching to the middle, diligently following the curriculum. However, the data on her students showed that no one in her class was in that middle. So every lesson that she was delivering was either too challenging or too easy for her students.

We want to see our teachers differentiate their lessons for their students. Why would teaching our teachers be any different?

Personalized professional learning is effective because it’s explicit, intentional, and continuous.

As we grow, our skills increase and our need for specialized learning also increases. 

Personalized professional learning is explicit – it leaves no doubt of what is intended to be learned and how to put that into practice. It’s intentional – it’s designed with each individual learner’s needs in mind as well as how that aligns with the school’s needs. And, it’s continuous – it puts each learner on a continuum of rigor, providing a robust, diverse, and increasingly more rigorous learning experience.

Personalizing professional learning can start with inventorying skills.

In Invest in Your Best, the authors present the T.I.M.E. Model for personalizing professional learning. 

A key piece of this model is to inventory teachers’ passions.

Gather the data you’ve got from your TeachFX reports, classroom walkthroughs, and all the various channels. Look to your PLCs to be like a think tank for the type of professional learning that our teachers need and want.

And ask your teachers. They know what they need. Not every teacher knows what they need in every classroom, but our master teachers always do. So do an inventory of what they think they need and then target those areas.

What will you try, to better support your teachers?

The most important spaces in schools are classrooms – where teachers have a direct impact on students and positive student outcomes are linked to teacher performance.

So…grab a posted pad, open up a new doc, or send yourself an email…right now - while this is fresh. Jot down one small step that you're thinking about doing when it comes to providing your teachers with data-informed feedback and personalizing their professional learning. 

You don't have to boil the entire ocean. What’s one small step that you might be able to make today, or in the next week?

Or, instead of a step you’ll take, write a question that you’ll seek to answer.

You can even send it to the team here at TeachFX!

We’d love to start this journey with you.

Administrators & Coaches

Classroom Teachers