As a School Head or other academic leader, you want your school culture to encourage teachers’ professional development. At the same time, you need to hold faculty accountable to the high professional standards of performance needed to achieve the student outcomes parents expect.
To successfully implement comprehensive faculty development in your school, a healthy faculty culture and teacher buy-in are essential. However, introducing a new evaluation system with a separate approach to growth goals is often difficult. Many people are resistant to change.
How can School Heads and academic leaders get teacher buy-in for a new model of faculty growth and evaluation?
A Barrier to Getting Teachers on Board: A Toxic Faculty Culture
While ISM’s Comprehensive Faculty Development framework can help improve faculty culture, a toxic culture where there is no trust cannot support its implementation. If this is an issue in your school, you must first bring your faculty culture to a healthy base level. A school cannot grow with teachers who are negative in faculty meetings or disrespectful to peers and others. You certainly do not want teachers who reject the school mission or core values.
How do you overcome a toxic faculty culture? Start by surveying teachers about their experiences at your school; uncover their perceptions of predictability and support they receive from administrators. A toxic school culture could be the result of teachers’ actions, or it could be a leadership problem. Prepare to make changes if necessary.
A growth-based faculty culture leads to better student outcomes.
A toxic faculty culture represents poor relationships between teachers and the administration. There must be a state of trust to get teachers to buy-in to the new faculty growth and evaluation process.
Tune in to ask questions related to this Source article or other topics you've encountered lately.
Visit our NEW Community and start posting.
How to Improve Trust
First, your faculty needs to know the “why” behind your school's developmental growth and evaluation approach. What goals are you looking to achieve as an institution? What is the school trying to accomplish?
Professional development should not be an event. It should be an integral part of the teacher’s experience every day. Teachers provide the necessary environment for students to excel. Allow the faculty to innovate to drive success.
If a school is to function well, human resources also needs a system to evaluate whether essential expectations for professionalism are being met. Teachers must be held accountable for meeting the essential expectations your school has defined (such as arriving on time, treating peers with respect, etc.). Establish a means to deal with any teachers who don’t adhere to your standards. The evaluation process must be consistent for everyone.
Teachers must know and understand the growth and evaluation process.
The purpose of a growth and evaluation approach is to encourage professional development and improve performance of teachers and students. Teachers must understand that your school has their best interests in mind. Be clear and transparent about your process and the goals.
Administrators should not rush to implement a system before the community is ready to take it on. Every time something new is tried and fails, trust is damaged. Your school must be ready for the transition to ensure its success.
Don’t be surprised if your faculty is skeptical of a new process.
Teachers may be concerned that findings from observations, a key part of the growth process, may also be used in their evaluations. You must be clear about the difference between these two processes and reinforce this in practice.
The evaluation conversation between a teacher and a supervisor must only address essential expectations and not observations. This consistency on the administration’s part ensures the two processes are not conflated.
Engaging Teachers
Teacher-directed growth goals are a motivator you need to develop. When teachers experience the growth and development process completely separate from being evaluated, the benefits are evident. The result is a faculty that trusts the administration and is willing to buy-in. However, there is much more to a goal than just setting a target. A good growth goal is clear and well-defined. What does a good growth goal look like?
First, goals must have a deadline. An open-ended goal does not stimulate the effort to achieve. Teachers need to see an endpoint.
Next, there must be a way to measure completion of the goal. Teachers and administrators must be able to see that the goal has achieved expected outcomes.
Finally, the result should be clearly defined and easily measured. The anticipated outcome should be apparent in the benefits of improved professional development and student experience.
An unmet goal is not a failure! By going through this process, teachers and administrators learn to create better goals. In this way, professional development becomes a lesson in what does and doesn’t work. Teachers engaged in this process with a supportive administration develop a trusting working relationship.
A growth-focused faculty culture built on predictability and support promotes teacher growth. When teachers and administrators have a positive, trusting relationship, faculty culture improves. Your faculty needs to trust that comprehensive faculty development is in their interest and gives them a growth environment. Your faculty will buy-in when they clearly understand and trust the process.
