Do you even have time for professional development?

When somebody tells you they have professional development your teachers will actually use, the first thing you think isn’t whether it’s good. It’s: With What Time?

Even if you found the day, you’re not sure you can stand in front of people who have already absorbed too much this month and ask them to absorb one more thing.

The problem was never that the professional development you’ve bought was bad. A lot of it was good. It’s that good PD still costs you a full day and substitute teacher costs.

That’s exactly why we made TDI non-reliant on PD days or pulling teachers out of the classroom.

“We don’t have PD days to give to this.”

You don’t have to find any. No institute days required, no early release to carve out, and no substitute coverage to arrange, because nobody leaves the classroom.

A TDI coach comes to your building and goes into classrooms while teachers are teaching. Not a mock lesson, not a planning period, the actual third period they were going to teach anyway. The coach watches the real job and then gives that teacher feedback specific enough to use the next morning. Nobody got pulled. There was never a gap to cover. Everything you had scheduled for that day still happened.

Paras get left out of professional development because of coverage. You can’t pull the person whose entire role is being in the room. When the support comes to them during the day they’re already working, that problem disappears.

If you want to see where this would sit on your building’s calendar, you can request a custom PD plan and we’ll map it against the year you’ve already scheduled.

“My people are maxed out.
I can’t ask them for one more thing.”

The Hub is something a teacher goes and gets on the day a problem shows up. Transitions after specials are eating six minutes she doesn’t have, so she searches the Hub during her prep and pulls a one-page routine she can run that afternoon. Everything in there is built to that scale.

Tools they can put in place inside five minutes, and trainings under fifteen minutes when she wants to learn something new, written to be used tomorrow rather than filed.

We call it “boots on the ground” resources

“This turns into new meetings on my master schedule.”

NEVER! Executive strategy sessions with your leadership team are virtual and they run inside a block you already hold like a leadership meeting, a PLC, an admin period. The hour is structured so that every KPI and plan we need to decide and set up for an entire semester gets done within that hour.

“How would I know it’s working with
no rubric and no rating?”

Every teacher who has been evaluated knows what judgment feels like from the doorway. A clipboard, a closed door, a number with their name on it.

What happens after a TDI observation is a Love Note, written the same day, and it goes to the teacher. It names ten to twenty specific things that went well in the lesson we watched, one or two growth areas tied to goals that teacher set for herself, and a Hub resource matched to those.

There’s no score and no rubric that is sent to a teacher so they feel great about their current efforts.

Your visibility comes from a different place.

The Leadership Dashboard shows you what’s happening across your building while the year runs. What your staff are choosing to learn and what that tells you about where they’re struggling.

How they’re feeling.
Where implementation is landing and where it isn’t.

You’re seeing what your teachers do when nobody is making them do it, which is a different kind of information than an observation cycle gives you, and nobody on your team has to be assigned to go pull it in June.

Joyce and Showers’ research on professional development found that when training happens without sustained follow-through in the classroom, only about ten percent of it reaches actual practice. TDI’s own partner data shows 74% classroom implementation inside the first 30 days. The coaching keeps going after the session ends, in the room, where a strategy either works or it doesn’t.

When we ask why, it’s rarely the content they name first. It’s that their staff loved working with us, found the way that we do PD to work within their daily rhythms and that the administrators finally had a PD plan that took things off of their plate.
Rae

P.S. If you want this mapped to your building, with your calendar, your staff, and the goals you’ve already set in it, get a custom PD plan. You get a written plan built for your school specifically, with the year laid out against the schedule you already have.

And if you already have a PD Plan in your inbox, book a call with our team here.