SMART: The Antidote to Initiativitis

One of my responsibilities as Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction for Gilmer ISD is to provide staff development for faculty, staff, and administrators. Upon arrival in Gilmer ISD seven years ago, I discovered that staff development was minimal at best. Most of the faculty had not received any training, other than required state training, for quite a number of years. In order to determine professional development needs, I developed and administered a Needs Assessment Survey. The results indicated that differentiated instruction, developing higher order thinking skills, and best practices (research-based instructional strategies) were the greatest areas of need. As a result of the survey, I set about providing as much staff development as I possibly could. For the next five years, the teachers were inundated with a variety of staff development trainings focused on the three areas of need indicated on the needs assessment survey. Every teacher in our district also had 45 minutes of planning/meeting time together as a department or grade level, in addition to their 45-minute conference time, for the purpose of collaboration and planning implementation of prior professional development. Although, we were experiencing a slight improvement in student achievement, for all the time, effort and money, we really weren’t getting the results we had expected. Teachers were not using their time wisely in the planning meetings because they really didn’t have a focus or structure in place to help them plan effectively for instruction. We took it for granted that all teachers would be able to do this if given time in the day to do so. We assumed incorrectly. In the summer of 2006, our superintendent attended a SMART Goals Training Session conducted by Jan O’Neill and Anne Conzemius and discovered turbo meetings, a productive process where groups meet for a specific purpose to accomplish a set task. Turbo meetings provided the structure we lacked for implementation and planning. The following year, we began using the turbo meeting process which assisted teachers in learning how to meet together for instructional purposes. Teachers were now meeting productively, but we still had all of that professional development training fragmented across the district. In the spring of the year, the superintendent asked me to go to the SMART Goals training he had attended the summer before. That summer, June 2007, I attended the training along with two campus principals and the two curriculum specialists who worked with me. The very first morning, Jan talked about reasons why teachers, campuses, and districts work hard and spend time in staff development but were not getting the results they desired. She used the term “initiativitis.” That term was an eye opener for me – it was a term that described Gilmer ISD. We had provided lots of staff development, all of those professional development plates were spinning, and we were working hard to keep them from falling. That was our problem. We lacked the structure to focus the professional development, and we had failed to give the teachers time to implement. Talk about educational malpractice! We were expecting the impossible from our teachers and ourselves. After discussing our “initiativitis” problem with Jan, we decided to have a conference call with the superintendent within the next few weeks. My colleagues and I talked incessantly about this during the next two days of training. When we returned to Gilmer, I immediately met with the superintendent and relayed our excitement about the SMART Goals process. While he initially saw the SMART Goal process as a means to an end for meeting productively and getting the most from our teachers instructionally, we now looked at SMART Goals as a means to bring structure to our professional development and to focus our direction. I knew that we could not do this alone. We needed assistance to pull all of the past training into a manageable framework. We began working with QLD in the fall of 2007. We began with district and campus goals, moved to grade level and department goals, and are now beginning our third year with student goal setting. Student achievement has improved significantly, our test scores have risen dramatically, and all of the professional development now has a place in the day-to-day operation of the campuses. -- Sigrid Yates, Executive Director of Curriculum & Instruction, Gilmer ISD, Gilmer, TX