Incentives and Supports

We believe our entire organization is a place in which both teachers and support staff are treated as professionals, with incentives and support to continuously improve their professional practices and the performance of all students. We will be a learning organization where we create structures to enhance distributed leadership for teachers to support one another and contribute to a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. Teachers will be supported to meet both their professional and mental health needs as they continue their careers with on-going job-embedded learning, mentoring, and research. All staff are expected to partake in rigorous and continuous professional learning on a variety of digital platforms to ensure high quality and equitable education to best meet the diverse educational and social-emotional needs of all students in a blended learning environment. There will be a collective commitment to operate in a way that creates openness through mutual accountability, transparency, and collective commitment. Resources will be prioritized to ensure a high-quality curriculum, equitable professional development for all staff, and high-quality instruction. A career ladder system with levels of support to develop skills, and incentivize a commitment to continuous growth for all within the organization including, students, teachers, administrators, and support staff.

Design Principles

Madera Unified will design structures for providing teachers collaborative professional learning time, as well as the systems of support that they will need from principals and district staff to ensure that teachers make the most effective use of this time. Effective uses of time include:

● teachers visiting one another’s classrooms, for professional learning and growth, rather than accountability,

● conducting debrief meetings to reflect on what they’ve seen and support one another in their growth,

● assessing authentic student work together to help level-set the standards and expectations for all students, (iv) conducting practitioner inquiries (action research)

● collaborative lesson planning, and

● action research (practitioner inquiry). Teachers might conduct research on their subject area in teams, get up to speed on the latest work in their field, and develop new teaching strategies, tools, and lessons in state-of-the-art innovations in their field.

How do these Design Principles reflect the comparative research?

Paramount to creating a professional working environment for teachers is non- instructional time so that teachers can collaborate during the work day. The focus is collaborative professional learning and working time, when teachers improve their own practice in ways that are focused on student learning. Because it is so deeply focused on student learning, it is imperative that it take place during regular working hours when students are in the schools and actively engaged in learning. Creating this time in the normal schedule on a daily or weekly basis will fundamentally change what it means to be a teacher toward a more professionalized role.

These collaborative forms of professional work organization are modeled on the approaches of the strongest school systems globally. But this is not just the way teachers work in Shanghai or Singapore. It is the way most professionals across America do their jobs as well. Every day, doctors, nurses, architects, engineers, lawyers and other “knowledge workers” engage in this kind of preparation, collaborative data analysis, and professional learning in a job-embedded way. The time for this collaborative activity is not allotted separately on specified days but rather indivisibly integrated into their normal work functions.