Planning Staff Development: A Year-long Data Cycle

Step 1: Choose your focus
It’s very important that your staff development focus be appropriate in scope. Sometimes staff developers are overwhelmed by areas of need, but it’s best to choose a small topic for the entire year. For example, if you try to cover reading, writing and character education, none of the topics will be given the depth they deserve.
For elementary school, some example possiblilities are:
-small group work in reading (or writing, math, etc.)
-one-on-one conferences
-accountable talk
-character education
-writing across the curriculum
-mental math
-higher level thinking and questioning
-goal setting (high expectations)
-informal assessments

Step 2: Break down your topic into 3 or 4 parts
You want to follow the data cycle (see below) for each sub-topic. For example, if my focus is small group work in reading, I might break it down into 4 parts: planning small groups, promoting student discussion, appropriate texts, and small group assessment.

Step 3: Use the data cycle to make a year-long staff development outline

Plan the entire data cycle for each of your sub-topics. In my example, the ouline might look like this:

Quarter 1- Sub-topic: planning small groups
Sep 4th: Baseline assessments
Sep 10th: Set goals for quarter during team meetings
Sep 12th-Oct 25th: Strategy work – sessions 1-8 (specifics determined collaboratively)
Oct 17th: Lesson Study #1
Oct 27th: Assessments
Nov 1st: Data Day #1 (to analyze assessment data/goals)

Continue similar cycle for other sub-topics through rest of school year.

Step 4: Strategy Work
Decide how you will cover your material. What degree of collaboration will make sense for your staff? If you have many new teachers, you may need to deliver information in whole-staff meetings. If your staff experience is varied, you may need to plan differentiated staff development. In any case, it makes sense to include teachers in decisions (especially when it comes to setting acheivment goals).  The lesson study is a great way for teachers to work together on a common focus.