One of the most important components of delivering a quality education is the continual professional development of our teachers. In addition to other training activities that go on all year long, twice each year we devote a full day to this important area – what we call an “in-service” day.

The first of these two days for this year was held this week. The next will be Tuesday, Nov. 6 – Election Day. (This has proven to be a good day to do this as so many of our schools serve as polling places.)

As with any workplace, it’s difficult to schedule large numbers of employees for training. Some parents have suggested training in shifts during a school day, so we wouldn’t have to close school. But we simply don’t have that many substitute teachers available, and it would be extremely expensive to pay that many substitutes if we did have them. We could also do early-release schedules, but there would have be five to six early-release days over the course of the school year. Devoting two full days instead avoids that. We do try to announce these days as far in advance as possible, usually a year ahead. (In the 2008-09 school year, the in-service days will be Sept. 17 and Nov. 4.)

An in-service day is a regular workday for the other employees in the district, with just a few exceptions. Much of our lunchroom staff isn’t in, as there are no hungry kids to feed. But our bus drivers are still transporting students to the 20 other schools we serve every day, our maintenance staff is still hard at work, and our administrators perform their regular work, if they aren’t directly involved in the in-service day itself.

It’s a different kind of day for teachers, though their workday on an in-service day is as long as a regular day. In the in-service day this week, we had different groups of teachers moving around to different sessions, in different buildings, at different times, throughout the day. Each day usually concludes with a keynote speaker from outside the district. It’s quite a feat of scheduling, all coordinated by our Curriculum Department.

That department, led by Curriculum Director Bonnie Fitzharris, works in planning the in-service day activities. They work with a team that was created as part of our strategic plan, to help oversee and plan for our staff’s professional development.

The focus areas of the different sessions are wide-ranging. During the in-service day this week, the schedule included trainings on new elementary science materials, autism, phonics diagnostics, safe handling of chemicals, AP math classes, and gifted education. Underlying all these different areas was the unifying theme of differentiation. That is a key focus of our professional development this year. Differentiation means, in brief, to recognize the different learning styles of students and deliver instruction in ways that meets the needs of each of them.

Teachers really do make the difference. We work to recruit, hire, and retain the very best. And then we work with those teachers, throughout their careers, to help them maintain and build their professional skills.

Cathy Milligan
Superintendent
Fairfield City School District

Published in the Fairfield Echo, Sept. 13, 2007