Professional Development Helps Grow New Teachers— but the Right Dosage Matters

By John Wink, Wink Educational Consulting, Presenter

Holly took her two-year-old daughter, Chloe, to the hospital for a routine procedure. The doctor calmed her concerns by detailing how quick the procedure would be and reassuring her that her daughter wouldn’t feel a thing as she would be sedated. Based on her confidence in the doctor from their years of knowing each other, Holly felt relieved and comfortable that everything would be fine.

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The nursing staff began preparations for the procedure, and the sedation prescription was administered. Immediately, Chloe started sweating profusely, talking nonstop, and screaming in terror 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 an imminent danger to her life. Immediately and with calm automaticity, the hospital staff responded to address Chloe’s little body, and after two hours, she was stable and ready to be released to go home.

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 two-year-old 2.0 mg, more than two 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?

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 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 what the doctor did to little Chloe, causing our new teachers to overdose on professional learning. When we provide too much information in one big dose, novice teachers and even teachers new 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 newto-profession teachers for the past three years, there are three ways 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 six or even three hours of professional learning and walk away competent and confident to implement every strategy 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 thirty-minute to onehour live synchronous sessions via Zoom to give novice teachers quick, practical, and meaningful professional learning based on the common challenges 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, providing a two-prong approach to learning. First, they provide short lessons on new content that take less than eight minutes to complete, and second, they intentionally spiral prior content in three-minute activities. When learners use the app five days a week for three to eight 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 with a year-long approach to developing novice teachers in three- to six-minute activities accompanied by one or two reflection questions to guide them in implementing their new work. Teachers can also share their learning with their administrator or coach and make action plans to immediately transform their learning.

3 Mentoring Structures to Solidify Novice Teacher Support

A major determining factor if new teachers will succeed is the quality of the mentoring program the novice teacher receives. In traditional mentoring programs, campus leaders assign mentors to novice teachers and give them 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 often they don’t have the time to prepare for the deep work of mentoring novice teachers in a concise and precise manner.

For mentoring to be a success for every novice teacher, 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 for the content 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 used to train novice teachers, 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, 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 curealls. 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. ■

Bonus Secret!

from “Eight Secrets to Excellence in Every School”

Systems of professional learning ensure excellence in all classrooms.

Former school principal and superintendent John Wink is currently an educational consultant on school success and a presenter for Solution Tree. Since starting his work with school districts in Arkansas and Texas, Mr. Wink has a successful record of leading school success initiatives.

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