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An instructional coaching leader from South Carolina shares how his state is using teacher-leaders, PLCs, and video observation to inspire self-improvement.
How do you provide helpful, personalized professional development to thousands of teachers? That’s a question longtime instructional coaching expert Dennis Dotterer and his team at the South Carolina Department of Education have been working on for more than a decade. The system he and educators around the state have created supports personalized PD, save times, and reduces costs.
What’s the secret of South Carolina’s success? Here, Dotterer, the Teacher Incentive Fund Transformational Director for South Carolina, shares three of the most valuable best practices he’s discovered on his journey to create effective and sustainable PD programs.
- Build leadership through personalized PD and self-reflection. When Dotterer talks about the importance and benefits of personalizing PD, Hampton District One immediately comes to mind. Aiming to increase the number of instructional leaders in the district, Hampton One created a five-week program designed to support teacher growth. The teachers in the program are highly respected mentors, but they’re classroom teachers, not dedicated instructional coaches.
Through the program, each teacher is connected with a grade-level peer, a school instructional coach, a member of the school administration and someone from district administration. Using Insight ADVANCE (a suite of tools that use video for classroom observation and evaluation), teachers share videos of their instruction with a different person each week and receive feedback. Teachers then review the feedback data they received and identify an individualized path forward as well as best practices they share with their peers.
As Dotterer explains, using this approach, “Teachers get to the point where they’ve enhanced their own self-reflective skills so they can identify the needs of their students and themselves.”
- Plan for sustainability. Over the last year, Dotterer and his team have removed a performance pay incentive and focused instead on the more sustainable goal of “increasing teacher efficacy through PLC support and coaching.”
So far, new coaching system is being used in 50 schools from five districts throughout the state. Schools use videos as part of their observation/evaluation system, capturing teacher performance and scoring it with the state rubric. The key here, says Dotterer, it’s finding a productive and not overwhelmingly time-consuming way to help coaches and administration provide teachers with the essential feedback they want and need.
“Teachers see that feedback actually makes their life easier. Rather than thinking ‘Great, it’s one more thing,’ they understand how this will support what they want to do as teachers and what we want to do as schools.”
The system is also saving districts money. As Dotterer explains, “They don’t need as many full-time coaches because using a video-based feedback system, an individual doesn’t have to be in your classroom at the time you’re teaching to be able to coach you.” For schools with two master teachers or instructional coaches, Dotterer says, that’s a savings of almost $200,000.
- Collaborate on coaching to save time and concentrate efforts. As Dotterer puts it, “Obviously at the middle school level, district leaders couldn’t get in to see 72 teachers. However, they could have 72 teachers video the first five minutes of their lessons and share them.”
Instructional leaders can then divide those videos among the leadership team for review and bring a summary of what they are seeing within the school to the next leadership team meeting. Those findings can then direct what professional development will be delivered during PLCs or full-faculty PD efforts in the near future.
In addition to guiding PLCs or school-based PD, Dotterer says instructional leaders can identify whether best practices are being implemented effectively or what modifications could be made to best meet the teaching style of a particular individual—continuing the productive cycle of feedback that empowers teachers to improve.
With these best practices in place, Dotterer and his team are now looking for future ways to improve professional development. Over the next year he hopes to roll out a new iOS app that lets teachers record and share videos directly from their phones with only a few clicks, making it even easier for them to get feedback and improve their practice.
Wendy McMahon is an education technology writer who has been working and writing in the edtech field for more than 15 years. Follow her on Twitter @wendymcmahon.
Dennis Dotterer is available via email at dadotterer@ed.sc.gov.