Summer Admin Decisions Will Shape Your Student Success In August

Most of the hardest problems that show up in November were created in July.

Not intentionally.
Not negligently.

Just by filling the summer with the logistics that feel urgent (scheduling, staffing, facilities) and leaving until August the work that requires more thought.

Here’s what I’ve seen make the biggest difference when school leaders use their summer well. If you want help building a custom PD plan for the year, that’s where we start.

Decide what you’re not doing this year.

Every improvement initiative that didn’t fully take root last year is still on someone’s list. The curriculum that was piloted but never fully adopted. The advisory period that’s on the schedule but not really working. The PD plan that had good sessions but no coherent thread.

The most useful question you can ask before school starts is: what are we supposed to be doing that we’re not actually doing well? And then: should we keep trying, or should we make a clear decision to stop?

Schools that do too many things do none of them well. Summer is when you make the hard call about what this year is actually about.

Meet with your teachers before they’re in survival mode.

If you can have actual conversations with your staff in the week before school starts, when people are still rested enough to have them, those conversations will pay off for months. Ask teachers what worked and what didn’t. Ask what they wish they’d had last year. Ask what they’re most anxious about for the year ahead.

This is data you can’t get from a survey. And it’s data that will make your first month of school significantly easier.

Plan your first professional development session last.

Most PD calendars are built in the summer based on what leaders think teachers need. The best ones are built after the conversations above. Your first session of the year should respond to what your teachers actually told you. If you build it before you listen, you’ve already started the cycle of irrelevant PD that your teachers will spend the year tolerating.

Set your own sustainability plan.

Administrators burn out too. The fall is hard. December is hard. March is hard. If you have not identified, in July, what you are going to protect about your own schedule and capacity: what you will say no to, what you will delegate, what is genuinely yours versus what accrued to you because you’re good at saying yes — you will spend the year reacting instead of leading.

It’s a survival strategy for people in a role that requires you to be stable when everything around you isn’t.

A PD plan for the year starts now.

If you want support designing professional development for your school that will actually change what happens in classrooms, TDI helps schools build those plans. Start here.

Rae

P.S. Ready to build something like this for your school or district? Get a custom PD plan.