Writing a Remediation Plan

Scott Hollinger, EdD

In a perfect world, all of our teachers would be rock stars. But our world is not perfect, and sometimes we’re faced with a struggling or marginal teacher. Teachers can fail to perform adequately for a number of reasons: family, mental, or health issues; interpersonal issues; or just lacking the skills needed to work with the students in the school. Teacher ineffectiveness can manifest as poor instruction, poor classroom management, failure to connect relationally with students and colleagues, failure to submit lesson plans, arriving late or leaving early, or refusing to attend required meetings. The impact of ineffective teachers on student achievement and the culture of the school cannot be overstated, and it is the duty of the principal to help struggling teachers improve or to replace such teachers.

Ethical treatment of employees (and nearly all state and local policies) requires that the principal’s first effort be toward remediation of a teacher’s deficiencies. A good-faith effort means that the principal must provide adequate guidance, coaching, and support so that a teacher who wants to improve his or her performance can. Only when good faith efforts to help a teacher improve have failed can a principal move toward termination or nonrenewal. These employment-ending decisions are strictly governed by state law and contract agreements. Principals often lament that “It’s impossible to fire teachers,” but this usually means that a principal has failed to do the work necessary (or to do the work with sufficient quality) to prevail in a grievance or contract dispute.

Helping marginal teachers improve cannot be left to chance and cannot be attempted informally. A formal professional growth plan (or remediation plan) makes clear to all parties how a teacher must improve, what constitutes acceptable performance, and by when the improvement must be evident. When successful, the professional growth plan (PGP) is the vehicle by which a marginal teacher attains satisfactory status; when unsuccessful, the PGP is evidence needed by a principal to take adverse employment action.

Professional Growth Plans

While some schools use the term professional growth plan to drive the professional development of all teachers, regardless of performance, the PGP described below is intended specifically to direct the improvement of marginal or struggling teachers. Most district policies require that the development of these PGPs be a joint effort by the marginal teacher and the supervisor.

Most teachers and school leaders are familiar with the notion of professional growth plans. We understand that PGPs give teachers a list of activities they must do in their efforts to improve. But just giving a list of activities is not enough—and it’s the primary mistake that supervisors make in writing PGPs. If, for example, a teacher is struggling with classroom management, the principal can direct the teacher to read a book, observe a colleague, and attend a workshop. It’s quite possible for the teacher to do all of those activities and not change her performance at all. In this case, the principal is stuck: the teacher has complied with the directives but hasn’t improved her practice. Now what?

4 Necessary Elements

An effective Professional Growth Plan must include four elements:

1. Notice that improvement is needed.
2. Directives for specific performance.
3. Offers of specific support.
4. Timeline for improvement.

Notice that improvement is needed

The first element of a professional growth plan is a clear statement about the kind of improvement needed. The language for this statement of needed improvement should be taken from a document of authority (such as an indicator from the school’s adopted teacher evaluation document). For example, a teacher that struggles with classroom management might need an improvement notice like this:

Performance Standard 7 of the Teacher Keys Effectiveness System (TKES) states: The teacher provides a well-managed, safe, and orderly environment that is conducive to learning and encourages respect for all. In order to meet this standard, you must manage your students’ behavior so that your class is conducive to learning.

Directives for specific performance

The second element of a PGP is a directive for performance. This directive typically includes both teacher behavior and student behavior. The teacher above who needs to improve classroom management might need a directive like this:

In future classroom observations, I will expect you to monitor your students’ behavior and to redirect students when necessary so that most students are on task and engaged in the learning and so that most students successfully achieve the learning objectives.

This is the element most often missing from ineffective PGPs. The directive for performance must include observable and measurable behaviors. The PGP will include offers of support (see below), but the success of the PGP is not determined by the teacher’s completion of the growth activities; instead, the success of the PGP is determined by the teacher’s performance vis-à-vis the directive for performance.

Offer of support

The third element of a PGP is a list of one or more activities that the teacher can undertake in order to improve performance to meet the requirement of the directive. In the example of the teacher who needs to improve classroom management, support activities might include the following:

1. Observe Mr. Smith and note his classroom management techniques, then discuss with your instructional coach why these techniques work.
2. Read How to Manage Classrooms and discuss your reading with the principal.
3. Attend a workshop titled “Classroom Management for Teachers” and discuss your most important learning with the assistant principal.

Typically, district policy requires that improvement activities in a PGP be funded by the school. In the above example, the school would purchase the book and pay any registration fees for the workshop.

Timeline for improvement

It’s not reasonable to expect that a teacher would receive a PGP on Friday afternoon and be expected to demonstrate adequate improvement by Monday morning. The PGP must specify the timeframe in which the teacher must demonstrate improvement—and the timeframe must be “reasonable.” What constitutes a reasonable timeframe varies from teacher to teacher and from situation to situation. In general, teachers who have received a long string of satisfactory evaluations (perhaps from former administrators) must be given more time to improve than first- or second-year teachers. A timeframe for our example might look like this:

I will expect to see satisfactory classroom management by the beginning of next semester.

Final steps & good faith effort

A written copy of the PGP is reviewed with the teacher, and both teacher and administrator sign their agreement. If the PGP is to be successful in improving the teacher’s performance—or if it is to be useful in ultimately terminating the teacher—the principal must make a good-faith effort to support the teacher in his or her efforts to improve. The existence of a PGP does not limit the principal to the supports outlined in the document. For example, a principal could also assign an instructional coach, conduct weekly walk-through observations, and hold frequent feedback conferences in an effort to support the teacher’s growth and improvement.

For a fuller treatment of this topic, see Kemerer, F. R. and Crain, J. A. (2016). Texas documentation handbook: Appraisal, nonrenewal, termination, 6th ed. Austin, TX: Texas School Administrators’ Legal Digest.

Reference

Kemerer, F. R. and Crain, J. A. (2003). The documentation handbook: Appraisal, nonrenewal, termination, 3rd ed. Austin, TX: Texas School Administrators’ Legal Digest.