• Base professional development on principles of adult learning.
• Determine the appropriate professional development options, and consider individualized or differentiated professional development.
• Have teachers develop annual professional goals.
• Incorporate structured, formalized time and resources for coaching, collaboration, and reflection into professional development programs.
• Use teacher evaluation data to inform professional development needs.
• Why It Is Important

• Why It Is Important

• Why It Is Important
• Use professional development time to provide space for teams to work on tasks connected to school and district goals and the continuous improvement plant (CIP) and school improvement plan (SIP).

• Why It Is Important

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• Revisit the Ohio Standards for Professional Development and the Organizing for High Quality Professional Development handbook for guidance on developing Individual Professional Development Plans (IPDPs).
• Encourage differentiation and flexibility in professional development that focuses on teachers being able to improve their individual practice.
• Allow teachers options to select individualized, grade-level, subject-area, or team-based opportunities to ensure professional development opportunities are relevant and useful.
• Bear in mind that choices need not be mutually exclusive (e.g., schoolwide training, smaller team development, mentoring, and/or individually guided activities).
• Consider including the following options for job-embedded professional development: action research, case discussion, coaching, critical friends groups, data teams/assessment development, examining student work/tuning protocol, implementing individual professional growth/learning plans, lesson study, mentoring, portfolios, Teacher-Based Teams, and study groups.

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• Encourage teachers to use collaboration and reflection opportunities to explore the relationship between the professional development provided and the impact on student learning.
• Use TBTs or communities of learners to provide these opportunities.

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• Sustained, aligned, intensive professional development that is connected to practice is essential for improving teaching because it provides teachers with time and resources to develop reflective and relevant practices that can lead to mastery of content and pedagogy.
• In addition to improving teachers’ instructional practice, high-quality professional development can create a more collaborative and more professional school culture.

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• Teacher-Based Teams (TBTs) are a vital part of growth-oriented schools in that they can promote collaboration among school leaders, teachers, and other school and LEA personnel (within and across these groups).
• TBTs also can provide teachers and other school staff with opportunities to share in leadership responsibilities and to develop and demonstrate leadership potential. These leadership responsibilities can be rotated between team members over time.

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• Revisit the Ohio Leadership Development Framework guidance for TBTs.
• Direct a portion of professional development time and resources toward facilitating the formation of collaborative teams tasked with developing school improvement plans. The plan may include specific benchmarks used to identify additional professional development needs.

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• Determining outcomes for professional development and defining measures for making sure that these outcomes are achieved ensures that professional development resources are used efficiently and effectively, and that they meet the Ohio Standards for Professional Development.
• Ongoing monitoring can ensure that the districtwide strategies and actions for improvement are connected to the district (or community school) goals and student needs that inform professional development.
• Formative and summative monitoring of professional development strategies and actions also support Stage 3 of the Ohio Improvement Process.
• A productive feedback loop between professional development and the comprehensive continuous improvement planning process reassures leaders that teachers are receiving the tools needed to be effective in the classroom as per the LEA vision of success.

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