Building Consensus for School Wide Professional Development

If you are a teacher then I am sure you have experience the same debates at your staff meeting on various school policies such as to wear hats or not to wear hats, to wear bandanas or not to wear bandanas, to have a mandatory sunshine fund or not to have a mandatory sunshine fund..... You get the idea, the issues are endless and getting consensus nearly impossible.  So how then does one go about deciding on a common Professional Development goal?  If we can't even decide if the students can wear hats or not in school how are we going to decide our yearly common professional development?

I was recently at an iNacol conference and was at a session that addressed just that.  It was so mathematical that it was brilliant!  It involved two surveys that the staff had to complete that took into account everyone's preferences and ideas and amalgamated the two into a solid number at the end that was hard to argue with.  I will try to explain this process as simply as I can (and it is not a difficult process which is what makes it so brilliant!)

Survey #1:  What is important to you as a staff?
Decide what is important as a staff with regards to professional development.  Make a list of 10 items (could be more or less but 10 is a nice round number).  The items could be things like: relates to other division initiatives, time efficiency, ease of implementation or data collection.

Below is a picture of a sample survey with just 3 items:

If everyone on your staff completes the survey and weighs the importance of all the items on the list then all you have to do is total the average weight for each category (Google forms will do this for you so you don't even have to get out your calculator for this stage:) and use that weighting in survey 2.



 

Survey #2: Use the Weights from the first Survey and apply them to each idea for Professional Development.

So let's say that of the three items my staff chose the average weights are as follows:

• Relevance to other division initiatives  8.2
• Time Efficient 9.5
• Easy to Collect Data 9

And as a staff we brainstormed the following professional development ideas:

• Incorporating Differentiated Assignments within units
• Incorporating Videos within each assignment
• Providing Choice for topics of study

We would then make the following table and have each staff member fill it out and find their brilliant number for each Professional Development Idea:
Incorporating differentiated assignments within units

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Weight (from survey)
Relevance to other division initiatives							X				8.2	57.4
Time Efficient						X					9.5	57
Easy to Collect Data										X	9	90
The Brilliant Number!												204.4

 

If you total everyone's Brilliant Number for each idea, the highest one wins!!

Everybody's ideas have been taken into consideration and the importance for each person has been taken into account, and voila the numbers don't lie.  The idea with the highest number is the best solution for the year and everybody's happy:)

I thought the idea was simple, precise, and was considerate of everyone's needs.

You can find the original slide show presented by Dan Tenuta and Kris Keckler: Best Leadership Practices by clicking the link.