Planning Professional Development for Your Faculty: A Guide for a New Department Head

Part of your role as head of a subject department is to develop your staff individually, as a group, as well as your department in general. This means that you must create a development plan based on what you and your staff consider necessary and the changes required by law, education authorities or school administration initiatives.

You should also consider your staff’s requests for personal professional development. Near the end of each year, I would meet with each staff member to discuss their wishes for professional development for the following year. I would make suggestions on what I would like you to consider.

Based on all of this research, I planned professional development for the following year as part of my Annual Operating Plan.

I always kept a reserve of funds for unforeseen opportunities to use for great career development that suddenly became available or for a topic of sudden importance that came up.

Be sure to include yourself in professional development plans. After all, you must be able to guide your staff on any new educational development.

Keep in mind that professional development should empower your department and also be designed to develop each teacher according to their individual needs. Remember that professional development is an ongoing, long-term process. Therefore, it is important to have both a short-term plan and a long-term plan.

Professional development can be as simple as a senior teacher showing a junior teacher a different way to approach a lesson or as diverse as sending teachers to an educational conference outside of school.

Whenever possible, I would send two teachers to professional development workshops outside of school. He hoped they would prepare a report on the workshop suggesting ideas that might be of value to the other teachers. I would include your report in my next memo.

The other important objective of sending two teachers was to allow them to work together on the important problems that came up in the workshop and to compare notes. Two teachers who share your enthusiasm for a new concept will have a greater impact on the rest of your staff.

When a new syllabus is to be introduced, education authorities will often organize workshops to implement the new syllabus. Some teachers are often wary of change. Therefore, the “controversial” questions that will be raised about the new syllabus at the workshop might need teachers with open minds to change. So what you will need to do in your department is carefully select the teachers to send to the first workshop.

It may be just as important that you attend that first workshop to get a better idea of ​​which teachers would be the best to send to these workshops first. Also, it is important to keep your staff informed about what is happening at these workshops.

It is also a useful idea to organize workshops in your own school that all of your staff can attend. I did this with every new syllabus. Because I was able to hear an excellent speaker discussing the new curricula, I invited them to present workshops for my staff and other teachers from nearby schools. The speaker would give me a brochure on what would be discussed in the workshop. I had this printed as a record for each attendee. I asked the speaker to include at least one idea or item that teachers could use in their classroom the next day.

A final consideration for you is to develop teachers as leaders within your department, especially teachers who can assume your role should you be absent from their department. So look for future leaders and make sure they are given the professional development necessary to become future leaders.