Teachers are not interchangeable. They have different capabilities, different skills, and different techniques, and they need different tools to do their best work. One shoe does not fit your entire staff. So when we set out to transform our schools, we have to be certain that we are giving each teacher the specific skills and tools they need along the way — not a single generic training handed out to everyone, but genuine development matched to where each teacher actually is.

In schools with a strong culture and high expectations for achievement, something important takes hold: a shared sense of responsibility for student learning and an optimistic belief that the school can be made to work. That belief is not naive. It is the foundation on which everything else is built. A healthy school culture has a powerful effect on staff development because it creates the conditions in which teachers want to grow—and keeps the focus where it belongs: on meeting the academic and personal needs of each child.

In this kind of culture, teachers and administrators alike want to improve their own skills and knowledge, not because they are required to, but for the good of the children they serve. And where that desire to grow is present, learning thrives. Student misbehavior decreases. Faculty complaints diminish. The whole building begins to move in the same direction.

But here is a truth we too often ignore: accountability only works when we first allow teachers to grow professionally through ongoing staff development. We have built a system that tests our students and then, based on those results, rewards teachers with raises when scores are high — and punishes teachers or closes their schools outright when scores fall short. I am still waiting to see the justification for this policy.

It makes no sense to demand results while withholding the support that makes results possible. If a teacher is struggling, the answer is not to punish them and wait for them to fail. The answer is to identify why — to understand their strengths and their weaknesses — and then to help them improve through meaningful, sustained, and yes, mandatory staff development. We do not fire a patient for being sick. We treat them. We should extend the same basic decency and practical wisdom to our teachers.

This vision becomes reality through one thing above all: increased interaction among teachers and school administrators. Successful schools are marked by dynamic communication and genuine joint work among staff members — teachers planning together, solving problems together, and no longer laboring alone behind closed doors. The research is detailed enough that this kind of communication correlates strongly with improved student achievement and enthusiasm, as well as with teacher productivity and satisfaction. When teachers work in isolation, everyone loses. When they work as a community, everyone rises.

A strong school culture produces exactly this: teachers with a shared commitment to meeting the needs of all students. That is what a real staff development program is for. Not to check a box, not to satisfy a mandate, but to build a faculty that grows together, supports one another, and gets better every year — for the sake of every child who walks through the door.