Cycle of Growth

| This reflection illustrates how one leader built an enduring system for professional learning by embracing a cyclical—not linear—approach to improvement, where each year’s work informed and strengthened the next.

At the end of the 2021–2022 school year, I was ready—after surviving two COVID years—to start thinking about the future of instruction at our small, K–8 Catholic school. Working with a leadership coach and the assistant principal, we identified that the problem we wanted to address first was creating a culture of adult learners. We have some talented teachers at our school, but not all of them were open to adapting their instruction to include best practices and were content to do things as they always had. The goal was to build a culture in which all teachers had opportunities to grow professionally. But first, we needed to define what good teaching looks like at our school.

We decided to take advantage of our existing PLC structure. Because we have just one class per grade, teachers meet in teams of K–4, 5–8, specials, and intervention. The idea was that in their grade-level meetings, they would brainstorm ideas about what makes education excellent, using the categories from Danielson, plus an added category of Catholicity. At the end of the school year, the team would take their ideas and turn them into a user-friendly guide for teachers.

The calendar for professional development that year included administrative meetings near the beginning of the month where we discussed how the prior month’s work had gone and made plans for the current month’s category, such as Planning and Preparation. The topic would be introduced at our monthly staff meeting during the first week of the month. Then, the grade-level teams would meet using the plan the administrative team gave them for that month’s meeting. Finally, the leaders of the grade-level teams would meet with the administrators during the last week of the month to share what they learned. That structure formed the foundation of all professional learning in our school moving forward.

Each school year since then, we have introduced a new topic that has been rolled out the same way. The year after the description of academic excellence was introduced, we focused on high-leverage techniques in each of the categories. Best practices were shared at our monthly faculty meetings; then the teachers would bring examples from their classrooms to their grade-level meetings. The year after that, we decided to focus on teacher clarity throughout the year, as that was identified by Hattie’s research as the most impactful teacher practice.

Last school year, we changed the name of those leaders to Instructional Team Leaders, which better reflects their role. Now, as we head into the 2025–2026 school year, I know that I have a solid structure in place to improve instruction and sustain a culture of adult learning. The Instructional Leadership Team has become a key instrument in bringing about needed change, and our scheduled meetings keep us accountable for our goals.