District Needs

Garland Independent School District is the twelfth largest district in Texas, serving over 57,000 students at 74 campuses.  In the spring of 2006, Garland ISD underwent a curriculum audit which included an analysis of the district’s professional development program.  The audit report recommended that Garland needed to look for ways to differentiate professional development in order to meet every teacher’s needs with relevant materials.

“We knew we needed to address the ‘one-size doesn’t fit all’ feedback we received from our teachers.  As district leaders, we wanted to provide other options besides large group training sessions, which limited our ability to differentiate,” said Dr. Butch Sloan, Executive Director of School Improvement at Garland ISD.

As Dr. Sloan and his colleagues discussed how to ameliorate this issue Garland began implementing classroom walkthroughs, during which principals were supposed to look for the nine high-yield Classroom Instruction That Works strategies.  Principals quickly realized that most teachers did not thoroughly understand the strategies and were definitely not comfortable using them.  The district began a major push at the beginning of the 2007 school year, purchasing a Classroom Instruction That Works book for every teacher and hiring an expert speaker.

“After heavily promoting the nine strategies, our teachers understood the strategies theoretically but were still hesitant to actually use them in the classroom.  We thought it would be helpful for teachers to see video of other teachers implementing the strategies,” said Dr. Sloan.

Garland ISD purchased several Classroom Instruction That Works DVD programs from the School Improvement.  Although the content was what they needed, they quickly realized it would be difficult to make the DVDs available to every teacher in the district.

Solution

Following their purchase of the DVD programs, Garland ISD was introduced to PD 360, the School Improvement Network’s on-demand professional learning resource.  Not only did PD 360 include the content from the Classroom Instruction That Works DVD, it contained an additional 70 programs on a wide variety of topics, each of which include real classroom examples of teachers implementing best practices.  PD 360’s on-demand delivery system enabled Garland to scale professional learning at the district-level, allowing them to reach every teacher in every location.

Dr. Sloan said, “When we found PD 360, we felt it would allow us to address our concerns around differentiating professional learning and move our current staff development to a whole new level.”

PD 360 is the leading on-demand professional learning resource for schools and districts with over 150,000 subscribers across North America.  With over 110 hours of research-based video content, teachers, administrators, professional learning communities, coaches, and mentors have available at their fingertips hundreds of indexed and searchable video segments that present real, best-practice classroom examples and feature respected education experts, such as Michael Fullan, Rick DuFour, Doug Reeves, Rick Stiggins, and many others.  Educators can instantly find the help they need on nearly every topic, including differentiation, assessment, English language learners, leadership, and more.  PD 360 bridges the gap between training and classroom implementation with job-embedded follow-up, tracking, and reflection tools.

Garland ISD began implementing PD 360 in the spring of 2008 by training over 200 principals and central office staff.  Before the 2008-2009 school year begins, Garland will roll out PD 360 for its nearly 4,000 teachers.  Central office staff and principals will support implementation at the campus level by presenting PD 360 to teachers and training them on how to use it.

Benefits

Although Garland ISD has not yet extensively used PD 360, Dr. Sloan already sees several benefits.

• Differentiated Learning for Every Teacher

With PD 360, Garland can meet its teachers’ needs for more differentiated and relevant professional learning.

“Our teachers were asking for more modeling and explanation than we were currently providing using traditional staff development environments.  With PD 360, our professional development will be much more flexible.  We can now meet a wide variety of needs with one resource,” said Dr. Sloan.

• Real Classroom Examples

One of the challenges Garland has faced is helping teachers move beyond theory to actual classroom practice.  With PD 360, teachers will have access to over 1,500 real classroom examples that show how to implement new strategies.  Separate elementary and secondary examples make learning relevant to teachers at every school in the district.

• Variety of Content

In addition to supporting Garland’s focus on the nine high-yield strategies, PD 360 includes many other programs on all the most relevant educational topics.  The four programs focused on teaching English language learners will be particularly helpful to Garland with its high population of ELL students.

• Integrated Tracking for Greater Implementation

PD 360’s integrated tracking and reporting has been very well-received by principals, who are now able to document what training teachers have completed.  In addition, the follow-up and reflection tools encourage teachers to do what they are supposed to do and ensure higher levels of implementation.

“We feel that PD 360 will be a very valuable tool to add to our professional development program,” said Dr. Sloan.