Professional Development: What Works (2nd Edition), by Sally Zepeda, helps guide principals, directors of professional development, school/district committees, and other leaders in creating an effective professional development program that moves ideas from knowledge to action. This tip provides eight simple ways to keep staff engaged during a professional development opportunity.

Last week, Eye On Education hosted its premier online conference, Eye On School Success. The conference provided teachers and school leaders with a wealth of practical ideas for their own professional development. One of our expert presenters, Pete Hall, led the popular session Motivational Leadership. In this tip, you will learn one of Pete's key strategies for professional development: prioritization.

Job-embedded learning, also called learning on the job, is a highly effective and efficient way to foster professional development in a school or district. Administrators and staff developers can create a variety of informal and/or formal job-embedded learning opportunities for teachers, such as lesson study, learning circles, study groups, coaching, and action research. Those kinds of professional development opportunities have several benefits:

They are usually less expensive than paying consultants to come to the school or sending teachers to workshops.

This tip, from Leading School Change: 9 Strategies to Bring Everybody on Board by Todd Whitaker, presents a strategy that will help school leaders leverage an essential group of staff members — their teachers. Todd Whitaker will be providing even more concrete steps for getting colleagues to champion and work toward the school change at Eye On School Success, An Online Conference, this March!

There are 3 categories of educators that will impact school change, “superstars,” “backbones,” and “mediocres.” Let’s examine the category that has the most influence, “superstars.”

The following guest post was written by Barbara Blackburn, author of Rigor in Your School: A Toolkit for Leaders.

One of the questions I’m often asked is how to use one of my books for a book study. Book studies are a great way to help develop a common understanding of a topic, such as rigor.

Teachers spend the majority of the school day behind closed doors with students, and there is little time left after planning and grading to collaborate with colleagues. Indeed, 93% of today’s teachers spend their official working day in isolation from other teachers (MetLife, 2010). This isolation, along with limited opportunities to share knowledge, has led a large number of teachers to explore new careers. In 2008–2009, the National Center for Educational Statistics reported 9.1% of teachers with one to three years experience left the profession  Keigher, 2010). Approximately 46% of these teachers report the most common reasons for leaving are lack of support, lack of influence, and inadequate time to collaborate (National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future, 2003).

The following guest post was written by Toby Rothstein Gruber, Eye On Education's Director of Professional Services and the moderator of Eye On Education's professional development webinars.

Have you ever felt like you’ve used all your classroom strategies, yet you still have those certain students that no matter which strategy you try, it just doesn’t work? On our February 9 webinar, Managing Disruptive Behaviors in the Classroom, presented by Bryan Harris we not only identified the 5 most common classroom disruptions, we talked about what to do with them. Just when you thought you were out of strategies, check out what our participants had to say regarding the following common disruptions...

During our January 24 webinar, It’s All About MEE, presented by Dr. Barbara Blackburn, Barbara talked about practical ways to activate students’ intrinsic motivation, increase student engagement, and raise the level of expectations in the classroom.

Three key questions were raised:

• How do you help students feel more successful in your class?
• How do you add value to learning for your students
• How do you demonstrate high expectations for your students?

For those who missed it, you can view the webinar on-demand...

Nothing says more about who you are as a leader than your leadership team and who you hire. Nothing! One lesson principals must learn early is that it is not about you—it’s about the team you assemble.  Here is some advice on filling teaching vacancies!

It’s a New Year and time to recharge! As a former teacher, I always took this opportunity to reset expectations and implement new strategies. Eye On Education aired a webinar on Student Motivation and Classroom Management with Larry Ferlazzo on December 14.  For those who missed it, you can view it on-demand. Strategies for building intrinsic motivation were discussed and our participants had lots to contribute. Thank you to our attendees for sharing innovative and practical tips about how they motivate their students. Here are 15 tips to get your students motivated in the New Year!

Effective teams are a hallmark of effective schools. To create and maintain high-performing teams, all members of the team must share and adhere to similar commitments, or values. They must set commonly agreed upon goals, and hold each other accountable for attaining them.

Take a moment and watch this clip. It only takes 3 minutes and will inspire you!
http://www.powerofteamworkmovie.com/

How can this video be applied to your professional learning community (PLC)?

Have you noticed that your classrooms have technology that is not being used to support instruction?  Are computers being used as bookends?  Are teachers assigning computers for "free time" and "rewards" only? Are interactive whiteboards being used as bulletin boards? Consider planning and implementing professional development to help support and encourage your teachers to use the technology to enhance student learning.

Dr. Sally Zepeda, recently named one of the University of Georgia's Distinguished Research Mentors, has updated her book, Professional Development: What Works. This post focuses on one form of job-embedded learning discussed in her book: study groups. Sally has expertise in the areas of professional development, instructional leadership, and the supervision and evaluation of teaching. She is available to provide on-site support.

While the first response to budget cuts for professional development might be putting such efforts on hold, other options are available. Focusing attention inward on internal expertise is one of them...

The following post is written by Elaine Vislocky, Eye On Education's Associate Director of Professional Services.

In a recently published report, the National Council on Teacher Quality examined student teaching—"the most important part of the teaching experience" as reported by new teachers. One of its conclusions is that there are not enough "quality cooperating teachers" (I will refer to them as mentors). Some of the problems they identify are the lack of clearly articulated, rigorous mentor selection criteria...

The following post was written by Elaine Vislocky, Eye On Education's Associate Director of Professional Services.

While it is easy to point to the many shortcomings in our educational system, it is much more difficult to offer credible solutions…and, particularly, ones that offer new, creative thinking. (Isn’t that one of those 21st century skills that we’re supposed to be teaching students these days?!) I’m excited that New York (Eye on Education’s home) is leading the way!...