The School Leader’s Guide to In-House Professional Development

Professional development (PD) is a pain point for many teachers and school leaders, especially when it is time-consuming or expensive, or it positions teachers to “sit and get” rather than engage in meaningful collaboration. The go-to model often involves a visit from an educational consultant, author, or thought leader who provides a single-day workshop on a designated topic, with little opportunity for follow-up. 

But that’s not the only way to do things: Setting up consistent internal PD— facilitated by a staff member, with multiple sessions and opportunities to give and get feedback—can motivate teachers and staff, encourage deep learning, and improve performance. To better understand this approach, I spoke with Dr. Danny Mendez, 2023 NASSP Indiana State Principal of the Year, who’s been a leader for 18 years at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. 

A champion of internal PD, Mendez has combated what he calls “disjointed” professional learning by moving from “25 to 30 different topics in a year, to three, which helps with developing the teacher and growing from week to week.” Internal PD involves many variables: scheduling, finances, staffing, data, feedback, new teachers’ needs, and leaders’ own learning, and Mendez shared how he handles those variables, describing a process that other school leaders can use to get started.

Establish a Regular Routine

The first step is to create consistency; Mendez believes internal PD “should be weekly, ideally embedded in your contractual day, before or after school. It can’t be four times a year, because you want follow-up once teachers roll their learning into classrooms.”

Follow-up enables teachers to take a data-driven, reflective approach to their long-term growth. They can “come to the next PD with quantitative or qualitative data on trends they saw,” Mendez noted.

Of course, this requires time—one of teachers’ greatest stressors. Leaders may face pushback, even if they embed PD in teachers’ contractual day. Mendez’s solution is to communicate the why: “It’s about building credibility. If you’re not showing up, you’re saying that’s not important. We’re putting the work in here for when you’re in front of those kids. We’re going to grow.”

Prioritize Internal PD in Financial Planning

Incorporating PD into the school day also has financial considerations, and not all leaders receive training on financial planning, so it can feel hard to know where to start. Too, many leaders don’t have full control over PD and need to make their case to district-level or other leaders.

Backward planning can help. “Oftentimes, simplification is the way to go,” said Mendez. “Let’s look at the resources we have—paraprofessionals, coaches. If we don’t have any, we need to look at putting money towards coaches and map out how to do that over two to three years. If we have resignations, openings might be for coaches.”

Fleshing out implementation allows leaders to better convince district officials, grantors, and stakeholders. Whether vying for allocation of Title I funds or communicating intentions to make changes through attrition, a leader can make a more convincing case if they’re able to say, “Here’s what our needs are, what our data show, how we’re going to run PD and measure results, and the type of coaching we’re going to be able to do.” 

It’s about saying, “This isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. You’ve got to grow your teachers if you’re going to grow your kids,” said Mendez.

Find Best-Fit Facilitators

Identifying and/or recruiting staff to support teachers’ growth is critical—you need professionals who can “design and lead PD and do follow-ups, going into classrooms to model, teach, co-teach, observe, and see strategies rolled out.” Mendez has found instructional coaches particularly effective in this work: “The principal, assistant principal, and department chairs can be a part, but coaching is critical,” he told me. “You need full-time instructional coaches or master teachers. How many depends on how big your staff is. We should invest in what effectively grows teachers, and that’s coaches.”

He also finds the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement helpful, particularly the mentor-teacher model in which “teachers with a full-time class help instructional coaches, or master teachers design and run PD. They have release time to coach teachers or observe and model. It adds credibility because they’re running their own classrooms, too.”

Support Coaches Through Data Collection

Leaders can offer their expertise by coaching the coaches. Mendez holds instructional leadership meetings in which he and his coaches “lay out what our strategy cycle will be for the next eight to 10 weeks. We talk about the skill we’re going to focus on based on data we’ve collected. It’s important that the assistant principal and principal are in the room, learning. Coaches design the long-range plan, and we discuss what we’ll hit week-by-week.”

Consistent administrator involvement fosters trust and promotes constructive feedback. “We have honest conversations about strengths and weaknesses—our own and the building’s,” said Mendez. “It helps to have a rubric for PD so we can give specific feedback. It gives them goals to work towards and helps you as leader say, ‘What should we be doing, and at what level?’ If it’s not effective, not only can I give feedback, I can say, ‘Here’s how we can support you in getting there.’”

Rubrics, financial plans, returns on investment—all relate to data-driven decision-making, to rooting one’s leadership in evidence. 

Student data: Mendez suggests selecting PD topics “based on real-time student data.” For example, “midyear, when looking at our next eight-to-10-week cycle, we focus on what the data say the biggest need is. We say, ‘Here’s the skill, but is that really the problem, or just a symptom?’ We brace-map, drawing lines between skills that go into that big one. We target a research-based strategy. When you focus on doing two to three things really well over the course of a year, you’ll move data much faster than when you try and hit everything.” 

Teacher self-assessment data: Just as leaders can use rubrics to guide PD, so can teachers use them to assess their growth in alignment with identified objectives. Leaders can leverage these rubrics when coaching: “If you have a self-assessment that’s not very accurate, you’ll be able to, in your future observations or evaluations, question: ‘I saw you marked yourself highly effective in this area. Talk to me about how you view that area; what are some examples?’”

Scaffold Support for New Teachers

Teacher attrition is a problem, with 55 percent of educators thinking of leaving the profession earlier than they’d planned. Numerous systemic stressors drive this trend, including a lack of resources and support, particularly for minoritized educators. Mendez noted the importance of supporting new teachers in the face of these trends. 

While mentoring programs for new teachers typically last one year, he finds a sustained approach more helpful: “I started doing it for two years—that was better. By year three, you see a different level of confidence.”

In particular, Mendez has found that new-teacher academies—regular opportunities, “even monthly,” for early-career teachers to meet with coaches, administrators, and veteran teachers—“build their capacity and confidence.” These relationships allow new educators to discuss their concerns, needs, successes, and challenges, and to access social support, one of the greatest contributors to well-being. 

Pursue Your Own PD

In order to oversee professional learning for staff—and to model it—it’s helpful for principals to be open about how they’re working to grow as leaders and open to receiving honest feedback from staff.

Mendez believes that “every AP, every principal, needs to be an instructional leader first. Outside of safety, that’s the most important role we have. That takes growing our capacity: What does effective modeling look like? Modeling to demonstrate performance expectations? Let’s look at a video, score it on our own, then talk about it, hash it out, debate.”  

Leaders might engage in this type of discourse through “weekly administrator team meetings during which at least a portion is for PD.” Doing so allows them to improve their coaching techniques while diving into research, readings, “cognitive coaching questions, the body language used in a meeting, and effective growth plans for teachers.”