Holly took her 2 year old daughter, Chloe, to the hospital to have a routine procedure. The doctor calmed her concerns by detailing how quickly the procedure would take and that her daughter wouldn’t feel a thing as she would be sedated throughout the procedure. Based on her confidence in the doctor from their years of knowing each other, Holly felt relieved and comfortable that everything would be fine.
The nursing staff began preparations for the procedure. The sedation prescription was administered and preparation for the procedure continued. Immediately, Chloe started sweating profusely, talking nonstop, and screaming in terrors at spiders she saw in the room. Her heart rate raced and her blood pressure increased dramatically. Chloe’s adverse reaction to the prescription created a crisis and imminent danger to her life. Immediately and with calm automaticity, the hospital staff responded to address Chloe’s little body, and after 2 hours, Chloe was stable and ready to be released to go home.
After reflection of the series of events, Chloe’s reaction was not due to a rare condition or allergic reaction. It was the result of a minor clerical error that produced major implications. Rather than giving Chloe 0.2 mg of Ativan, the doctor prescribed this little 2 year old 2.0 mg of Ativan, more than 2 times the adult dosage. Chloe was given the wrong prescription.
Do your current prescriptions of professional learning match both the maturity and needs of your new teachers?
In short, the dosage matters when it comes to helping people medically, and when it comes to professional learning, great leaders view all professional learning as good medicine that grows great educators. The problem with professional learning is that many educators have been institutionalized by years and years of the false belief that equal dosages for professional learning grow all educators equally. But that philosophy would never be accepted in our classrooms. One thing all educators believe is that differentiated instruction is a huge factor needed to close the unique gaps for all students; therefore, I contend that if we believe in differentiated learning for all students, we must model that belief by providing differentiated professional learning for all educators.
The challenges to the concept of differentiated professional learning are providing leaders time to prepare and provide a wide variety of professional learning and then providing the resources or people to deliver high quality and personalized professional learning. In my recent article, “Eight Secrets to Excellence in Every School”, I shared secret #5:
Systems of professional learning ensure excellence in all classrooms.
In order for learning expectations to be achieved, great leaders realize that there will inherently be learning gaps for every adult in the building; therefore, every learning expectation is accompanied by a professional learning expectation for the adults in the building. Professional learning is not an event for a day or two in the summer and sporadically throughout the school year. It is a 24/7/365 endeavor. Great leaders make continuous efforts to train their followers in face-to-face or virtual environments, synchronous or asynchronous events, weekly communications via email and daily interactions with all stakeholders. Great leaders remember that they are great teachers of teaching first.
In order for us to provide 24/7/365 professional learning, we also need to consider that many new teachers to the profession cannot process the same dosage of professional learning as returning educators. If we fail to acknowledge that fact, we will do to our teachers what the doctor did to little Chloe, causing our new teachers to overdose on our professional learning. When we provide too much information in one big dose of professional learning, novice teachers and even new teachers to our campuses will become overwhelmed and ultimately fail to implement their new learning in their work with students and staff.
How do we ensure we don’t overdose our new teachers with too much information and professional learning?
3 Magic Prescriptions for Professional Learning
If we want to save our teachers, we must acknowledge the fact that professional learning is a prescription drug that if not carefully measured will burn teachers out with unnecessary stress. In my work with novice or new to profession teachers for the past 3 years, there are 3 ways that I have successfully helped schools ensure that novice teachers thrive and grow exponentially in their first year to the profession or campus.
1. Bite-Sized Synchronous Learning.
New to profession teachers cannot sit through 6 hours or even 3 hours of professional learning and walk away competent and confident to implement every strategy they learn unless leaders create a bite-sized synchronous learning plan to spiral the content throughout the school year. Every month, we work with leaders around the country to provide 30 minute to 1 hour live synchronous sessions via zoom to give novice teachers quick, practical, and meaningful professional learning based on the common challenges that new teachers face. Every month, new teachers work with our staff in a live and collaborative training session to learn content, collaborate with their colleagues, and make a plan to implement their learning in instruction.
2. Top Notch Teacher Academy - Asynchronous Learning
Babbel is one of the fastest growing language acquisition apps in the world. Their premise is simple. They provide a two-prong approach to learning. First, they provide short lessons on new content that take less than 8 minutes to complete and second, they intentionally spiral prior content in 3-minute activities. When learners use the app 5 days a week for 3-8 minutes per day, their language acquisition accelerates.
We have launched the WinkEdLearning App to provide all teachers learning modules over the Hierarchy of Instructional Excellence, but we are excited to launch our new TNT (Top Notch Teacher) modules that provide new teachers a year long approach to developing novice teachers in 3-6 minute activities accompanied by 1 or 2 reflection questions to guide them in implementing their new work. The teachers can also share their learning with their administrator or coach and make action plans to immediately transform their learning.
3. Mentoring Structures Solidify Novice Teacher Support
A major determining factor if new teachers will succeed is the quality of the mentoring program that the novice teacher receives. In traditional mentoring programs, campus leaders assign mentors to novice teachers and give them some basic guidelines of what to do to help mentees succeed. Where we fall short is failing to recognize that mentor teachers have a lot on their plates for their own classroom, and oftentimes they don't have the time to prepare for the deep work of mentoring novice teachers in a concise and precise manner.
In order for mentoring to be a success for every novice teacher, and not be a variable of effectiveness, leaders should create a scope and sequence of topics and concepts to regularly discuss with novice teachers. In our work with school districts around the country, we are working with mentor teachers to prepare them on the content that novice teachers cover in the Top Notch Teacher Academy in our WinkEdLearning app. The idea is simple. We expose mentor teachers to the same content we train novice teachers on, and then give mentors guidelines to facilitate mentoring conversations between the mentor and mentee. We believe that when mentors have structure in the specific work they do with novice teachers, both the mentor and the mentee have a greater chance of success and the mentee has a greater chance of returning the following year. Support only works when you build the structure for it to work.
The Magic is not Magic; It's Intentional
The population of new to profession teachers is growing every year and due to the challenges of being a new teacher coupled with the challenges of society, retaining teachers is an even greater challenge. If we want to be successful at not only retaining teachers, but growing them as well, leaders must be intentional in their efforts to develop each teacher’s competence and confidence with the best and most precise dosage of professional learning. The 3 Magic Prescriptions are not cure-alls. They only work when we, leaders, are intentional and persistent in prescribing the best professional learning to our teachers. When our work with teachers is implemented with fidelity, teacher retention transitions from a lofty goal to an absolute certainty.
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