Professional Development Evolving
JANUARY 25, 2014
Promoting Quality Teaching: New Approaches To Compensation and Career Pathways
In late 2012, Accomplished California Teachers produced a policy report that recommended expanded roles for teachers in schools and districts, with a third-tier advanced certification for teacher leaders. You can read more about our proposals here. Since then, I’ve offered occasional blog posts highlighting some promising practices that advance our profession in the right direction.
One of the main areas of promise for teacher leadership is in professional development. Most teachers I’ve talked to and engaged with are craving both more and better professional development, an impression supported by survey data from American teachers. Even if we had the resources available, many of us lack the time to put resources to good use: compared to our international peers, we spend much more time in the classroom, leaving less time for professional learning and collaboration. It would be a step in the right direction if we could even set aside a protected, guaranteed one-hour per week, but in many schools and districts even that hour is hard to come by.
It seems clear to me that the key to both incremental change and the eventual transformation of our profession is not only to expand the capacity of teachers to achieve professional growth, but also to design and lead professional growth experiences. To that end, we need teachers who are increasingly aware of developments in the field, increasingly networked and engaged, and