Six Simple Steps to Create an Engaging In-service Training Program

By Dr. Barrett Mosbacker

June 15, 2013

“That was a waste of time!” I have often muttered those words to myself after sitting through a workshop. I walk in hoping the workshop will be different from so many others—engaging, informative, and practical. I usually emerge disappointed and frustrated.

That is the bad news. The worst news is that too often our teachers leave the training sessions we conduct or arrange thinking or muttering the same thing, or worse.

After a few years of enduring fragmented training programs that are long on talk, short on practice, and with little accountability or follow-up, teachers soon learn to go through the motions of professional development. “This too shall pass” becomes the oft-unspoken mantra. They make their appearance and then disappear, with little evidence that the training changed anyone or anything. That is a waste of time, talent, and money.

It does not have to be this way. It should not be this way.

Professional development should be engaging and practical for teachers. It should also propel the school forward in achieving its core mission and strategic initiatives.

Here are six principles for creating an engaging and relevant professional development program.

1. Strategically Align Your Training

Training programs should align staff values and skills with your school’s strategic initiatives. If one of your strategic initiatives is to enhance STEM instruction, your in-service program should emphasize training in those areas. If a strategic initiative is to strengthen student writing, your in-service should develop teachers’ writing skills and their ability to teach writing.

Surprisingly, aligning training with the school’s strategic plan is rare. In-service programs too often show little sustained connection with strategic objectives, leaving training disjointed with a different focus each year.

Take dead aim at your strategic objectives when planning your professional development program. Every tributary of training should flow into the strategic stream so that everything moves in the same direction and is mutually reinforcing. Your training should support your strategic plan, and your strategic plan should inform your training.

2. Sustain Your Focus

Old habits die hard. New skills require time and sustained practice to become new habits.

The best way to create positive change is to maintain sustained focus in your training. Concentrate on a few key concepts and skills over several years. Avoid the trap of annual du jour training. Serve the same basic entrée for several years, adding courses from year to year. The power of sustained focus is difficult to overstate.

3. Scaffold Your Training

To maximize your return on investment, professional development should be focused, sustained, and scaffolded. If your goal is to improve student writing, for example, you could design a focused, multi-year, scaffolded training plan along these lines:

• Year 1: Train teachers to improve their own writing skills. After all, you cannot teach well what you have not mastered.
• Year 2: Train teachers how to teach writing effectively.
• Year 3: Train teachers how to assess student writing efficiently and effectively.
• Year 4: Train teachers to help students use technology to produce and publish their writing for authentic audiences.

This sequence can certainly be compressed. By combining objectives, the plan above could unfold over two to three years. The point is that one week of in-service training will not produce significant improvement in teachers’ ability to teach writing, or any other skill. Without sustained, scaffolded training, the impact on student outcomes will be marginal.

This should not be a revelation. It takes years to teach students to write well. Why do we assume we can teach teachers to become expert writing instructors in a single week?

4. Less Is More

We try to cover too much. I have been guilty of packing too much training into the in-service week. While well intentioned, it is not effective. Like too many clothes stuffed into a suitcase, teachers emerge from training feeling pressed and wrinkled rather than crisp and sharp, ready for a new year.

An individual can only absorb so much. The central question to ask is: “What are the two or three specific behaviors I want teachers to demonstrate in the classroom from this point forward?” The answer should determine the scope of training. Discard or delay everything else.

Do an excellent job on a few things rather than a mediocre job on many. Do not seek to cover topics; seek to master two or three.

5. Make Training Hands-On

Lectures play an important role in training, but lectures seldom change professional practice. Research on adult learning consistently shows that passive instruction has limited lasting effect. If the majority of your training is lecture-based, most of what is presented will not take root in classroom practice.

Practice changes practice. There is a place for lecture—providing important background knowledge or explaining the rationale for training—but only hands-on practice will change how teachers teach. The dominant form of training should therefore be the active practice of new skills and concepts.

The best illustration is technology training, because most educators have experienced poor technology training. The typical session assembles a group in front of an instructor who demonstrates how to do something on screen. Participants watch, take notes, and perhaps fiddle with their own devices. But if they do not quickly begin practicing what was demonstrated, they will forget it. There is a meaningful difference between being taught and learning. Practice produces learning.

When a short presentation of a technique is followed by ample time for practice, participants begin to understand and use the skill. The more time devoted to practice, the more likely teachers are to incorporate that skill into their work.

A useful rule of thumb is a ratio of 1:3. For each hour of training, fifteen minutes should be devoted to lecture or demonstration and forty-five minutes to hands-on work. This is, of course, simply good classroom teaching applied to professional development.

6. Add Accountability

The adage “what gets measured gets done” applies directly to teacher training. Because change is hard, we need both support and accountability. It is seldom enough to provide a rationale for change or even to practice new skills. Without consistent and transparent accountability for implementing new concepts and skills in the classroom, little will change.

Accountability is not difficult to build into a professional development program. Revise your teacher evaluation instrument to include an assessment of the training provided. If you have trained teachers on techniques for teaching writing, add those techniques to the evaluation instrument so that they are assessed as part of the regular evaluation process.

Professional development can be effective and enjoyable, but it must not be ad hoc or an annual du jour experience. Good professional development is strategically aligned, focused, sustained, and scaffolded over several years. It is hands-on and supported by consistent accountability for applying what has been learned.

When school leaders practice these six principles consistently, teachers are far more likely to emerge from training saying, “That was helpful. I can do that.”