Building Level
Professional Development
Plan
Suggested Structure for Developing a
Building Plan from the
District Career Development Plan
The Building Level Professional Development Plan is a tool
for implementing the District Career Development Plan (DCDP) at the building
level. The DCDP is part of the Comprehensive School Improvement Plan (CSIP) and
is required of public school districts (IAC 281—83.6(2)). The optional building
level plan for professional development is recommended to clarify the actions
needed to address student learning needs and design professional development at
the building level. The Individual
Teacher Career Development Plan is based on the goals established in the
district plan and should align closely with the building plan for professional
development. The Iowa Teaching Standards and Criteria must be addressed by the
district, building, and individual plans for professional growth.
Both the DCDP and the Building Level Professional
Development Plan are based on the Iowa Professional Development Standards. The
Iowa Professional Development Model provides guidance and technical assistance
to assist schools, districts, and area education agencies as they implement
professional development for student achievement in their setting. This
workbook follows the Iowa Professional Development Model and provides a series
of steps and suggestions for school teams to use as they build a plan for
putting implementing the DCDP in their setting. (The components of the IPDM are
highlighted in gray.) For buildings that already have a professional
development plan in place, the workbook may be used to review the plans to
ensure that all essential elements are in place. The SINA building action plan
is an example of another format for recording plans.
It is recommended that the building plan be developed
jointly by the school administrator, teachers, and others. See the following
page for information about establishing a building level leadership team. Use this workbook to help the leadership
team consider the district and building data and goals, as well as the local
context for planning, making decisions, and communicating information.
The workbook is a companion document to the Iowa
Professional Development Training Manual. For electronic version of the Building
Level Professional Development Plan Workbook and the full text of the IPDM
Training Manual see: http://www.state.ia.us/educate/ecese/tqt/tc/prodev.html
Iowa
Department of Education
February 2005
For additional information contact:
AEA Consultant for Professional Development or Deb
Hansen
Iowa Department of Education
Des Moines, Iowa 50319-0146
Phone: 515-281-6131
Fax: 515- 281-7700
Deb.hansen@iowa.gov
Form
a Professional Development Leadership Team
·
Read the suggested purposes, composition, and facilitation
ideas.
·
List team members and roles below.
·
Set a schedule for PD Leadership team meetings and add to
calendar.
Suggested Purposes of a
Leadership Team:
q
To help
organize and support various professional development functions.
q
To engage in
participative decision making -- the democratic decision making processes for
keeping teachers involved and informed.
q
To help
principals sustain a focus on instruction and keep professional development
functions going.
q
To distribute
leadership up and down the organization.
Suggested Composition:
q
Teachers
representing various grade levels, content areas and role groups, i.e.,
elementary, middle school, high school, special education, Title I, gifted and
talented, general education, etc. (Include individuals who have specific
expertise in content, collecting and analyzing data, assessment, professional
development, etc.)
q
Principal
q
Central
office, i.e. directors of curriculum, staff development, and school improvement
q
AEA
provider/consultant(s)
Suggested Facilitation:
q
Clarify roles
of the team, e.g. assisting with the collection and analysis of data;
facilitating building meetings between training sessions; helping to collect
and organize implementation data; demonstrating strategies; supporting the
establishment of collaborative teams.
q
Establish a
protocol for meeting routines and a framework for agendas.
q
Determine how
meetings will be monitored and what data will be collected (Collect meeting
artifacts, i.e., meeting agendas and minutes).
List PD
Leadership Team members below.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Identify
the roles of the building PD Leadership team:
Add PD
Leadership Team meeting schedule to building calendar.
Collecting and Analyzing Data
·
Review
the district level data in the CSIP and in other tables and charts (See
Constant Conversation #1).
·
Describe
student data at the building level. Consider questions on the following page.
·
Record
answers to questions below. Attach tables and charts.
·
Discuss
data with leadership team and full faculty using “Discussing
Our School’s Data – Response Sheet”.
Data Analysis Statement
Question 1:
Findings:
Question 2:
Findings:
Question 3:
Findings:
Question 4:
Findings:
Question 5:
Findings:
For suggestions on where to find
data to answers these questions and methods for analyzing the data see Part 4
pages 21-22 of the IPDM Training Manual.
Sample of school questions:
1.
What areas of reading/math are most difficult for our
students? (For example, item analyses
of ITBS/ITED data will reveal scores for sub-categories of reading such as
“decoding”, “using context clues”, “determining main ideas”, etc.)? What are the strongest skill areas for our
students in reading and math? What are
the weakest areas?
2.
Do we have overlap among our sub-groups? (For example, how many of our students with
disabilities receive free/reduced lunch?
How many of our low SES students belong to ethnic minorities? Etc.)
3.
Did any sub-groups lower on portions of the ITBS than the rest
of our student population?
4.
What are the reading scores of students who have dropped out
of school this year?
5.
How often do poor readers get referred in a given year? Are
poor readers referred to office for discipline problems more often than good
readers?
6.
How much independent reading do our students do? At school?
At home?
7.
What supports for struggling students are present in our
school, neighborhood, and community? Do
we know how effective they are?
8.
Why are our students referred to the office? What are the most common forms of student
misbehavior in our school?
Sample of department/grade level questions
9.
What specific comprehension tasks account for any decline in
overall comprehension scores on the ITBS?
10. How many of
the 9th grade students reading below the 40th percentile on ITED are earning
D’s or F’s in English I?
11.
When we examine the item analysis data for each academic
area on the ITBS/ITED, are there any weaknesses discovered in specific items
consistently across all the grades?
12.
How many of our
students failed specific classes? For Example: How many failed English I?
Collecting and Analyzing Data
Discussing Our
School’s Data – Response Sheet
This worksheet provides a structured way to facilitate a discussion
about data. The PD leadership team should discuss the data and record the
team’s responses to the questions regarding the data. As soon as the data is
organized and ready to share, the leadership team and principal should share
the data and facilitate a discussion with the full faculty. This information
will support goal setting and other decision making about professional
development.
School
Name: Data Analyzed By:
Data
Collection Period: Date of Analysis:
Type of Data Analyzed: (Check the data source
you are analyzing.)
|
Student Performance Data |
|
|||
|
___ |
ITBS/ITED |
|||
|
___ |
Diagnostic: |
______________________ |
||
|
___ |
Grades or
Progress Indicators |
|||
|
___ |
Other: |
__________________________ |
||
1.
What
do you notice when you look at these data?
What are you comfortable saying about student or staff performance based
on these results?
2.
What
additional questions do these data generate?
3.
What
do these data indicate students need to work on?
Based on these data, what can we
infer teachers/administrators need to work on?
4.
What
do the results and their implications mean for your instructional practices and
building-level professional development plan?
Goal Setting
Establishing
a Target for Building-Level Professional Development
List the Annual Improvement Goals or
Annual Measurable Objectives for your building (Reading, Math, Science).
List the Professional
Development Target listed in the District Career Development Plan:
A PD target is narrower than the broad annual improvement
goal/ annual measurable objective. For example, a goal might be to improve
reading by x percentile. Data analysis indicate that inference is a difficult
skill for most students and may be contributing to low scores in reading
comprehension. Therefore, a professional development target would be to
increase reading comprehension by improving student’s skills in making
inferences.
List the Professional Development
Target for your building (if more specific than the one listed above).
Selecting Content
Describe the content to be studied.
(See DCDP)
The PD Leadership Team should read the studies and select one or two studies
that support the practices you will be studying in professional development.
Attach the research studies that support this content.
The team will lead the faculty in
reading and discussing the strongest articles.
Discussion Questions
1. What was the research
question? Were the authors trying to
solve the same problem we are?
2. What were the results of the
study? Were they reported in Effect
Sizes? If not, how were they
reported? Did the treatment benefit the
sample studied? In your opinion, were
the benefits substantial? Why?
3. Compare
and contrast the sample studied with your own student population. Has this treatment benefited other students
in previous studies?
4. Is this
treatment practical for your faculty?
Do you have access to trainers?
Do you have sufficient time in your PD schedule to learn this treatment?
5. Does the
study describe the moves of the teacher? If yes, what are they?
Designing
the Process for Staff Development
Describe how training will be
distributed through the year.
(For ideas for finding time go to
IPDM Training Manual Part 4 pages 101- 104)
How often will you have training
opportunities?
How long will they last?
How will you communicate with
trainers to ensure that the theory and demonstrations meet the needs of the
teachers and that practice opportunities are provided during training sessions?
Who will provide your training?
Describe how you will provide
theory.
Describe how demonstrations will be
included.
Describe how teachers will be given
opportunities to practice.
Describe how collaborative teams
will be organized.
Describe your communication plan for
sharing this design with your staff.
Insert your PD calendar for your
school.
List group training distributed
through the year.
List
times for collaborative team meetings (also called peer coaching meetings).
Plan
for weekly or at a minimum bi-weekly for at least 45 minutes per meeting.
Ongoing
Cycle
Training/Learning Opportunities
List the
schedule for training sessions and follow-up activities that will support the
delivery of theory, demonstrations, and opportunities to practice. Make sure
that training is distributed through the school year and is frequent enough to
address questions that arise from early implementation efforts.
Implementation
Describe
what your PD content will look like when it is in place. What will be the pattern of use? What will be the quality of use? How will it differ from current
practice? Will it be integrated with
current practice or will it replace current practice?
How often will the teachers use this
strategy/skill in the classroom? For buildings with multiple role groups, list
for each role group.
Describe how will you monitor your implementation. Include how you
will collect data on both the frequency and skill of use with your planned
change.
Who will collect these data and at what intervals?
How will these data be shared and with whom?
How often
will you compare implementation data with formative data on student responses
to your planned change? Will this occur
in collaborative teams, school-wide, and/or district-wide?
Collaboration
Each
school will develop a plan for teacher collaboration that enables teachers to
work cooperatively on learning new PD content and implementing it in
classrooms.
Please
describe your school’s structures for collaboration (e.g., how often will
teachers meet and for how long?)
How will
the teams be formed?
Who will
provide the structure for the use of collaboration time?
Who will
set collaborative meeting agendas? What will a typical agenda include?
Describe
how the building collaborative teams will communicate with the building PD
leadership teams and the district-level PD leadership team?
Formative Evaluation
Formative
evaluation is periodic measurement of progress toward your PD target. For example, if your PD target is the
improvement of reading comprehension, your formative measure will periodically
examine students’ reading comprehension.
What
instrument [measure(s)] will you use for your formative evaluation? (See research studies for ideas on how to measure student
progress and how to determine frequency of data collection.)
How often
will this measure be administered?
Will it be
administered to all students or a sample of students at each data collection
point?
How will
results be shared with faculty?
See Part 4
page 15 for questions to ask of Implementation and Student Growth Data.
Summative
Evaluation
Summative evaluation is primarily
the task of the district; each district must report its ITBS/ITED data to the
state each year and these data are used to judge the efficacy of the district’s
educational programs. However, it is
useful at the school level to also examine ITBS/ITED results, especially for
cohorts of students, as these data confirm results of earlier formative
measures and provide additional information to schools about the success of
their instructional programs.
Use data to answer questions:
Does this intervention work? Have we
accomplished our goals for student learning?
Should we continue this initiative
as is, or with changes?
Is the initiative complete?
The PD leadership team needs to
decide how to organize and display the data and findings to support future
planning.
High School Sample
Central High School
Building Level Professional Development
Plan
2004-2006
Leadership Team at Central High School
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Data for Central High School
We examined all our data
when discussing our priorities. These
findings were most influential in determining our PD target.
Professional Development (PD) Target for Central High
School
(District PD target is also
reading comprehension.)
Content for PD at Central High School
Two major studies on
Reciprocal Teaching are attached to this document. The faculty has read and studied them together and is aware of
other studies showing positive effects for this treatment. [Note:
Reciprocal Teaching has had positive effects on reading comprehension
when measured by experimenter-made tests but often has failed to translate into
results on standardized tests. The
Leadership Team will work
with the trainer to ensure
that practice and application include the types of tasks required by the ITED.]
Intensive reading classes
will use Second Chance Reading; reports of this program’s effectiveness with
struggling readers are attached to this document.
While training in Reciprocal
Teaching will involve all content area teachers, training in Second Chance
Reading will involve only those teaching the intensive reading classes.
PD Design for Central High School
Provider
Learning Opportunities for Central High School