My Monthly Column – November 2021

 Supporting PPS staff so they can best serve students and families

By Xavier Botana

Our Portland Promise commits the Portland Public Schools to realizing four goals: Achievement, Equity, Whole Student and People. To succeed, we need to have our staff – our People – share fully in that vision. 

That’s why we’re prioritizing fostering a district-wide culture where staff members feel supported to grow professionally in ways that best serve students and families.

That’s just one of four teaching and learning priorities this school year. The other three are strengthening core instruction to ensure students master grade-level learning; creating safe and equitable school environments; and enabling effective school operations.

I’m writing a series of columns about these priorities. This month, I’m focusing on our plan to deepen our professional learning culture. 

To begin this work, we’re asking all our educators to individually and collectively reflect on our current student outcomes – what students are expected to know or demonstrate when completing a course or a grade level.

Working together, we’ll use this to build a stronger, shared, instructional vision. This will help deepen our work to achieve equity and assist in providing professional development better aligned to our priorities and connected to our instructional materials and core practices.

This work will also elevate teacher leadership and help all staff collaborate more meaningfully. That will help foster a district-wide culture where people trust each other, work together and welcome feedback to grow professionally to better respond to our students’ needs.

Strategies to achieve this include building a common understanding of what we want students to know and be able to do as they move through the grades. We’re starting by developing a “portrait of a graduate” at the high school level – a vision for the skills, traits, and competencies that students need to succeed in college, career, and life. Educators across the district will develop the portrait to define exactly what we mean when we say that PPS students will graduate “prepared and empowered.”

Once we establish a clear portrait for our high school graduates, we’ll develop eighth-grade and fifth-grade portraits. These will help ensure a shared understanding of what elementary school students need to be prepared and empowered for middle school, and middle school students for high school.

We need all educators to deepen their shared understanding of and commitment to an equity-oriented vision for instruction. Our goal is to build trust, openness and appreciation for diverse approaches and opinions. That requires us all to be comfortable giving and receiving feedback in order to learn from each other and improve. To that end, we are including equity-literacy based language in our teacher evaluation system. 

We are committed to elevating and supporting our People who identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Color by implementing key recommendations from our Educators of Color Report. That report, released last spring, gave us honest feedback from our educators of color about their work experiences and barriers to opportunities in our district. A survey of all our staff also showed lackluster coaching, career development and professional learning opportunities.

As a consequence, we’re focusing this year on creating support structures and career pathways that lead to teaching and leadership opportunities for all staff. Specifically, we’re creating support structures for teachers that want to become administrators and for educational technicians that want to become teachers.

Years of research show that organizations attain their goals when they achieve a truly collaborative professional learning structure where everyone feels they have something to learn and something to contribute. That is what we are committed to accomplishing through our focus on professional culture in our schools.