How to Get PD Time in a World That Doesn't Want to Give it To You

In my posts Building Empathy to get Follow-Through and Do it Now So They Do It Later, I shared a couple high-impact tips on how to lead effective professional development around language access and communication equity to ensure that staff actually use the language access tools you have available for them.
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But that begs the question: how do you get PD time in front of staff in the first place? And the more schools you are trying to get in front of in your district, the bigger this question feels.
This question of today. 

Communication Equity Tip

Your request for professional development time will be much more effective if you bring other voices to the table in addition to just your own. Gather information, experiences, or statements from families, students, and/or staff. Choosing just one group will make a difference, and if you can highlight more than one, all the better.

There is a huge difference between how a person in a gatekeeping position listens to one person wanting PD time for their important agenda (everyone thinks their agenda is important, and everyone believes it deserves time and they are probably right) versus a person who is able to highlight the voices of others and say that this is what parents and students are saying their experience is in our schools or this is what staff are saying would be helpful to them.
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To be able to do this, I recommend you interview your families, students and staff. But today, let’s just focus in on staff.

The Story

In January of 2022, I started reaching out to people: principals, office coordinators, teachers, and operational staff to hear what their experience communicating (or not communicating) with multilingual families was like.

I put people on my list whose multilingual communication I was happy with as well as people I was frustrated with. I wanted to get as global a picture of what was happening on the ground with communication as possible.

When I got my time with them, I asked each person just one question, “What is the biggest challenge you experience or observe when it comes to communicating with multilingual families?” Staff shared freely, and even though I didn’t ask for solutions, often times they would go there for me. It is as if they had just been waiting for someone to ask.

Here are some actual quotes I got from staff when I did that:

“There isn’t a unified front or seen as a priority at all. Because it’s not seen as a priority, there aren’t systems in place or you have to go back and request the basics. They often say they have to come back and ask Anne. You have to take multiple steps just to come up with a flyer– have to check with Anne at every turn. It's like pulling teeth to just do the basics. Voiance and translating texts is very easy. I don’t know what the cause is other than you don’t see it as important. If we are going to be an antiracist organization this needs to be an engrained aspect of our operations. Just like math and reading are engrained in our idea of a school.”

“A [telephonic interpreter] refresher wouldn’t hurt. Also, teachers will often send texts when they aren’t in front of their computer and therefore not accessing Dean’s List. No one reads email or newsletters anymore, but we have all staff huddles that happen every Tuesday … so you could request a huddle to address multilingual family communication.” (Hello! Great solution!)
“Language barrier amongst staff and families is really challenging… Teachers – going the extra mile for a family that doesn’t speak the language – teachers … don’t have the resources or support to deal with it because they are stretched so thin.”

These conversations were incredibly helpful to me. In the first quote, my colleague was frustrated with her colleagues for their lack of independence with multilingual communication and need to check in with me constantly. However, it was a really valuable point of reflection for me: How had I failed to empower staff with the competence and confidence to take action? How had I, in my efforts to accommodate different schools’ different systems, actually failed to take a lead on creating a common system across schools – not as dogmatic control, but to create clarity?

One person suggested refresher trainings during school huddles, which I was able to implement, and which I consider to be one of the most important parts of my system. If I had never asked her for her input, I very likely would not have done that on my own.
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The last one spoke to something I knew to be true as a former content teacher myself: the workload is crushing. I knew that whatever system I developed would need to both make these steps of communication as normal and stress-free as possible, but that it would also help to literally give them time to place actual calls to families.

Call to Action

1. Calendar out a 2-3 week window to conduct mini-interviews with staff.
2. Make a list of at least 10 staff members you will reach out to, asking for just 5-15 minutes of their time. Make sure you ask people in a wide variety of roles and who, based on your knowledge, have a wide range of success and/or experience communicating with multilingual families.
3. Ask them one question only: What is the biggest challenge you experience or observe in communicating with multilingual families?
4. Write down their answers verbatim, thank them for their time and for helping you improve supports and resources
5. Come back to your notes, and start processing them. Some will prompt some soul-searching. Others will inspire clear next steps or ideas for the next year. However, all of them will inform how you design your PD in some way.
6. Finally, start talking to those people who decide and/or influence what the priorities for PD are, and share some of what you learned. This might sound like, “I am hearing from staff that using a telephonic interpreter is intimidating, and a refresher training during the year would be helpful” or “I’m hearing that our teachers are stretched too thin, and I know that if I give them time in PD to place calls, they can start to get some touch points with families and also build confidence in using our tools so it doesn’t seem like such a big deal.”

​Keep in mind that few people are likely to say, “I need a PD session that anchors me in the why and helps me practice the tools I’m expected to use”. You are more likely to hear things like, “Honestly, I haven’t made a call with an interpreter yet. It just feels like I don’t have time”, “I get really nervous about using an interpreter on the phone” or “Well, I haven’t had to use an interpreter because Ms. Maldonado just communicates to the family for me” etc.

However, you can take these comments and extrapolate from them things like:

Staff are telling me they are intimidated by our tools and processes, and I know I can make them more comfortable through training.

We have a lot of staff members who want to communicate with families, but because they don’t get trained, they don’t know how.

Because our staff don’t receive PD on this, they are finding ways to communicate with families via the kids, which is noncompliant with civil rights law and puts an unfair burden on our kids.

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