This might be a familiar scenario: You spend months planning a release day or afternoon for teachers and other staff to engage in professional development, but when the day comes, you discover that many staff members have called in sick or taken a personal day. Learning Forward wanted to know what’s behind this phenomenon and what to do about it.

We surveyed our social media followers, reached out to our partners at Teacher2Teacher and Principal Project, and talked with leaders of our Learning Forward Affiliates about reasons for the problem. Their insights point to strategies for ensuring all educators engage in high-quality professional learning.

Relevance is essential.

• 26% of Twitter and LinkedIn respondents said that educators skip professional development days when they don’t see them as relevant.
• 51% said educators skip when they perceive them as a waste of time.

Solutions:

• Design professional learning that is relevant, applicable to participants’ needs, and has clear follow-through steps.
• Engage teachers in sharing their needs and goals and co-design professional learning.
• Communicate about the value of professional learning for student success.

School leaders and teachers see different barriers.

• 48% of school leaders thought teachers skip because they feel overloaded, whereas only 29% of teachers felt that way.
• 34% of teachers said it was because they have a work conflict or no substitute coverage; only
• 14% of school leaders thought this was the case.

Solutions:

• Collaborate with teachers to identify work conflicts and structural barriers, including lack of available substitutes, and implement strategies to address them.
• Discuss reasons teachers are overloaded and recognize this affects their capacity to learn.

A small percentage of teachers skip because they need personal time off.

• Similar (and small) percentages of school leaders (14%), teachers (17%), and our social media followers (17%) believed teachers skip due to personal conflicts or to take personal time.
• Conversely, Learning Forward Affiliate leaders said some teachers take sick days to attend professional learning when not given released time by their schools.

Solutions:

• Examine time-off policies and consider ways to create more breaks for teachers.
• Communicate with school and district leaders about why it’s valuable to invest time and resources in both job-embedded professional learning and released time for learning.

Download pdf here.