#100DistrictConversations rolls on! I'm closing out the week with conversation #13 featuring Jeffrey Kitching. Jeff is a former Superintendent in Connecticut and he recently retired as Executive Director of EdAdvance, a non-profit in western CT that helps schools and communities by providing educational and community services including professional development for teachers.

During our conversation, Jeff talked a lot about the power of educational collaboratives as professional learning providers because of their local context and teacher expertise. I love the way Jeff talks about differentiating professional learning for teachers.

"In the role of Superintendent, I relied on the collaboratives we have in Connecticut that help support the purchasing of professional learning services. There’s a level of comfort that exists between CT's Regional Education Service Centers (RESC) and our district teachers. The coaches that these organizations send are not seen as outsiders. These organizations seem to have the time and capacity to plan unique offerings for each district partner.

One professional learning strategy we leveraged in my district was letting staff self-select their level of comfort with new professional learning concepts and strategies. Our school leaders would help identify the teachers who may pick new things up more quickly, which set these teachers up for success. Then we would tap these same folks to help scale things across an entire school staff. Midway through an effort like this, you end up developing a way more empowered faculty who can really drive and lead the work - it also helps us determine who the teachers are who need more help. We learned that the more barriers you can take off the table by differentiating and customizing the professional learning for teacher needs, the better all teachers perform and the less pushback we get as leaders.

As a district leader I was always looking for ways to scale our professional learning through internal staff members whenever possible. This scaling model is valuable for things like induction training because we really want our own people facilitating these sessions with new educators. It’s a way of communicating and disseminating the district and school culture in a way that is authentic to staff perspective."