Professional Development: Make It a Priority This Year! – Part 1

This is article is by Melissa Shipman, Executive Director of PACE. Melissa was a teacher of children with special needs for over 10 years, and has served with SHARE Education Services since 2002 as both a full-time and associate education consultant. She now lives in Georgia, USA with her husband and two young girls.

The life of a TCK education consultant is a busy one. When I was an education consultant in Eastern Europe, I returned back to my home country regularly to connect with and grow my support base and to attend graduate school in the summers. At home in Europe, I traveled almost 50% of the time. During my non-travel times, I had guests in my home about 50% of the time.

Before and after my travels, I had a number of administrative tasks on my plate: coordinating travel, managing testing schedules and materials, communicating with people on location to arrange for space needed, soliciting information needed from families before the trip and relaying promised follow-up information after the trip. Additionally, I had ongoing, big-picture projects that I worked on for my organization.

If you had asked me, I would have been able to tell you without hesitation what I needed to know more about. Topics like bullying, Asperger’s, and finding educational psychologists would have risen to the top of the list. After a few years in my role, however, I noticed that I just wasn’t finding the time to research, read, or take courses related to these topics. The “tyranny of the urgent” was taking precedence over the very important learning that I needed to do in order to serve families well.

Over time, I found ways to address this problem. And I’m still working on it. In preparing to write this article, I confess to you that I skimmed through over a year’s worth of unread scholarly journals to which I subscribe!

In the May 2014 issue of Educational Leadership, I found a framework that I knew would be applicable for those of us serving as TCK education consultants. I believe that our efforts at professional development – that is, sharpening our skills so that we can better serve our families and TCKs – are more effective when we take the time to carefully plan and consider what is needed.

Dr. Thomas R. Guskey, a professor at the University of Kentucky, proposes five steps in professional development for educators. In them, we can find an excellent framework for planning our own professional development activities for this school year.

1. Desired Student Learning Outcomes

Generally, TCK education consultants aren’t in regular classroom roles day-to-day. Instead of supporting students, we support families. So let’s extrapolate this concept into our role as education consultants. What outcomes do you want to see for the families you serve? Take the time to reflect on this for a moment.

When it comes to the education of their children, what outcomes do we desire for our families? Here are just a few that occur to me:

• I want the families I serve to never hesitate in contacting me for support.
• I want our TCKs to experience success in their school/education (whatever success looks like for them as individuals).

2. New Practices to Be Implemented

Guskey describes this as the “practices and policies…most likely to to produce the student learning outcomes we want.” Applied to the role of an education consultant, we might instead consider this: What are the practices of an education consultant that would foster these outcomes? Considering the outcomes I listed in step one above, I might consider these practices:

• I want open communication with the families I serve. I will be prompt in my return of emails and calls from families. I am available to Skype or video chat as needed.
• Plenty of time and care is given to education planning for families prior to leaving for the field, including awareness of their local options where they will live and serve, as well as awareness of the unique learning styles of their children.

3. Needed Organizational Support

Education consultants receive varying levels of support from their organizations. Some organizations make education planning and support a priority for families leaving for or already on the field; others mention education as an afterthought during pre-field meetings and trust that all will be well.

Guskey writes, “Many valuable improvement efforts fail miserably because of a lack of active participation and clear support from school leaders. Others prove ineffective because schools have not provided the resources required for implementation.” Substituting the word “organization” for “school,” it’s easy to agree with this statement in our roles. We can see how, without support from organizational leadership, TCK education consultants are limited in their impact and ability to serve families.

So we ask this: What do I need from my organization to implement these practices? Referring to the practices outlined above, I might suggest this:

• The families in my agency understand my role and know that I am available to them. My agency provides the technology needed to serve families.
• My agency emphasizes the importance of education planning prior to arrival on the field as well as on the field. Time and resources are allocated in such a way that reflects this as a priority. The leaders of my organization understand how success in TCK education aligns with the overall vision and goals of the organization.

Read on – here’s Part 2!

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