Dixon Public Schools expands professional development opportunities for staff

DIXON — After years of low attendance for summer training hours, Dixon Public Schools is working to offer additional professional development training for its teachers throughout the school year.

At Wednesday’s school board meeting, Assistant Superintendent Doug Stansford told the board the district is going to step away from its “summer symposium,” a multiweek summer training program for teachers’ and instead focus on offering that training once or twice a month throughout the school year during after-school hours.

The symposium is something the district has offered for a long time, and over the years the administration has noticed a steady decline in participation, Stansford said.

In an effort to increase involvement, DPS District 170 partnered with Rock Falls and Sterling school districts about four years ago so it could offer additional sessions. There was a slight increase in attendance after that, but since then it’s continued to go down, he said.

At that point the district decided to take a look at the problem.

One of the issues, Stansford pointed out, is that the school district has “a pretty rigorous summer school program.” There are over 25 teachers involved and about 10 to 20 aides, he said.

On top of that, throughout the past four years district teachers have been piloting a lot of new programs and new assessments. For instance at Dixon High School, the district added an entire new agriculture program into its curriculum this year.

“By the time the end of May gets here they’re pretty spent. Then to ask them to turn around the next weekend and to come in for some training, we can kind of understand where they’re coming from,” Stansford said.

By offering that training during the school year, the administration hopes to see increased participation and that the training will be even more effective and valuable for the teacher.

Stansford explained that each session would cover something “directly related to what they’re currently doing in the classroom.”

During the district’s last curriculum committee meeting, the administration asked the facilitators and administrators who attended to ask their teachers what they think would be “high-impact professional development that they would appreciate throughout the year,” Stansford said. At the next curriculum meeting in October, the district plans to use those suggestions to develop the training sessions going forward.

“Part of offering professional development hours [participants] also have to complete an evaluation that talks about the relatedness to the position that they do and if there’s anything else that we need to follow up on,” Superintendent Margo Empen said.

Throughout the year, the district also schedules professional development training by bringing in coaches to work with its staff. Stansford said coaches from Amplify, a company that offers curriculum and professional development to educators, recently work with staff in the district’s three elementary buildings.

Over the summer, staff that wants to participate in training still will have that opportunity through the Regional Office of Education.

“[Teachers] are always looking for these opportunities so it’s nice to make it as easy as possible,” Linda Wegner, school board president, said.

In Illinois, teachers must renew their professional educator license every five years. To do that, they have to complete a certain amount of professional development hours and pay a fee, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.

“I commend you for noticing a problem, doing something about it instead of just continuing to do the same old thing,” Wegner said.