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Principals serve schools as leaders of professional learning

Principals as leaders of learning
#7 in a series

By Dennis Sparks

Results, April 2005

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2005. All rights reserved.

"Today, people believe that professional development should be targeted and directly related to teachers' practice. It should be site-based and long-term. It should be ongoing - part of a teacher's work week, not something that's tacked on. And it should be curriculum-based, to the extent possible, so that it helps teachers help their students master the curriculum at a higher level." -James Stigler

The welfare of our children and the future of our nation depends on all students having quality teaching and supportive relationships with peers and adults. Principals of such schools have a clear vision of quality professional development and are able to communicate it in clear, compelling language to various audiences. They know the most powerful forms of professional learning are team-based and embedded in the core day-to-day tasks of teaching and learning - planning lessons, analyzing data, reviewing student work, and through honest conversations reflecting on the effectiveness of their efforts. Rather than leaving their jobs to learn, teachers learn as they do their day-to-day work. In these schools, professional learning is seamless with teaching rather than an added burden, and it continuously and incrementally improves the teaching of every teacher for the benefit of all students.

Successful principals know high-quality professional development deepens teachers' understanding of what they teach, expands their repertoire of teaching strategies, affects educators' beliefs about teaching and learning, creates a culture that supports teamwork, and produces a coherent stream of actions that continuously improve teaching, learning, and relationships within the school community. In these schools, teachers' acquisition of content knowledge and new teaching methods is aided when they consider how students learn particular subject matter such as mathematics or science.

Successful principals also know the most powerful forms of professional development make cognitive demands on teachers and administrators and require the use of increasingly sophisticated professional judgment. Such professional learning skillfully blends the abstract and theoretical with the concrete and immediately useful. It asks teachers to stand back to gain a broader perspective, to carefully consider cause-and-effect relationships in their teaching, and to unceasingly search for ways to make an even greater difference in the lives of their students.

Because learning has a strong social component and because the synergy that comes from group problem solving often leads to innovative solutions, skillful principals use intact teams within schools as centers of professional learning. Team meetings occur for the most part during the school day because they are an important part of teachers' responsibilities and benefit from the participation of all teachers. For various reasons, such sustained collaborative work is difficult to achieve after school and during summer months. When appropriate, teachers pursue professional learning outside their schools through courses, institutes, conferences, and cross-school or cross-district networks whenever such external resources are important for the achievement of school goals.

If a school so desires, it can significantly improve professional learning for its teachers within a year. It is critically important, I believe, that principals make the type of professional learning described here a high priority and set about realizing it with the sense of urgency it deserves. Students pass through our schools only once and are the ultimate beneficiaries of the quality teaching and supportive relationships such professional learning can produce in every classroom and throughout the school community.