Planning Professional Development for Your Teaching Staff: A Guide for a New Department Head
Digital MarketingPart of your role as head of a subject department is to develop your staff individually, as a group and as a department as a whole. This means that you must create a development plan based on what you and your staff think is necessary and what changes are required by legislation, educational authorities or school administration initiatives.
You should also consider your staff’s requests for personal professional development. Near the end of each year, I would meet with each staff member to discuss their wishes for professional development for the following year. I would make suggestions as to what I would like you to consider.
Based on all of this research I planned professional development for the following year as part of my Annual Operating Plan.
I always kept a reserve of funds for unforeseen opportunities for excellent professional development that suddenly became available or for a problem of sudden importance that arose.
Don’t forget to include yourself in professional development plans. After all, you need to be able to guide your staff on any new educational developments.
Keep in mind that professional development should empower your department and also be designed to develop each teacher according to their individual needs. Remember that professional development is a long-term, ongoing process. Therefore, it is important to have both a short-term plan and a long-term plan.
Professional development can be as simple as a senior teacher showing a junior teacher a different way to approach a lesson or as diverse as sending teachers to an off-campus educational conference.
Whenever possible, I would send two teachers to professional development workshops outside of the school. He hoped that they would prepare a report on the workshop suggesting ideas that might be of value to the rest of the teachers. I would include your report in my next memorandum.
The other important goal of sending two teachers was to allow them to work together on the important issues that came up in the workshop and to compare notes. Two teachers who share your enthusiasm for a new concept will have a greater impact on the rest of your staff.
When a new curriculum is to be introduced, education authorities often organize workshops to implement the new curriculum. Often some teachers are wary of change. Therefore, the “controversial” topics that will be raised about the new syllabus at the workshop might need teachers with an open mind to change. So what you will need to do in your department is to carefully select the teachers you will send to the first workshop.
It may be just as important for you to attend that first workshop to get a better idea of which teachers would be the best to send to these workshops first. It is also important to keep your staff informed about what is happening at these workshops.
It is also a useful idea to organize workshops in your own school where all your staff can attend. I did this with every new syllabus. Because I was able to hear an excellent speaker discussing the new curriculum, I invited them to present workshops for my staff and other teachers from nearby schools. The speaker would give me a handout about what would be discussed in the workshop. He had this printed as a record for each attendee. I asked the speaker to include at least one idea or item that teachers could use in their classroom the next day.
A final consideration for you is to develop teachers as leaders within your department, especially teachers who can step into your role in the event that you are absent from your department. So look for future leaders and make sure they are given the necessary professional development to become the leaders of tomorrow.