Professional Learning

The Professional Learning Department works to help Bulloch County Schools grow the district’s leadership capacity in order to support student success. It is our goal for all employees to be effectively trained and empowered to perform their tasks.

The Bulloch County Board of Education and its employees have committed themselves to the task of re-focusing and transforming the school system into a continuously improving model of excellence. Everything we do, from our strategic initiatives to our daily actions work together to fulfill our mission and provide alignment from the boardroom to the classroom.

The Bulloch County Board of Education has adopted the Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement’s Leadership Framework for System Improvement.  More than 300 school system leaders, including board members, central office administrators, school administrators, and teacher-leaders have been trained in this framework since 2012. 

These school leaders have learned to create a performance culture, build teams, analyze data, analyze causes, develop solutions, and measure and monitor results in order to support a vision of change and to strive for continuous improvement. These skills better enable our leaders to take community input and formulate strategic and school improvement plans. This continuous improvement training, coupled with the Board’s vision for change, provides the school system a foundation for a performance culture focused on student achievement. Team development, data analysis, root-cause analysis, solutions development, and measuring and monitoring, are all components of this performance management system tailored for public education.

The Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement has helped Bulloch County Schools establish its own leadership development program, Aspiring Leaders, for current assistant principals and teacher leaders who are preparing for future leadership roles within the district.   It is supporting participants in understanding how a strong sense of our district’s essentials of leadership along with professional skills and competencies help to shape effectiveness as a leader.

Aspiring Leaders is designed for assistant principals who desire to become principals as well as teacher leaders who aspire to be either an assistant principals or fill other leadership positions in the district. The 11-month, nine-session course teaches participants about instructional leadership, organizational management, planning and assessment, communication and community relations, professionalism and school climate. Their coursework culminates in a capstone project that requires them to do independent research on a question or problem applicable to their school or the district.

Taught by instructors from the Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement (GLISI), the program has graduated one cohort of 25 and the second cohort is underway. While completion of this program is not a guarantee of future leadership positions, it is certainly an opportunity to grow as a leader.

Bulloch County Schools’ goal is to create an effective education pipeline where there is open, continuous dialogue between grade levels, and schools so that ideas and best practices can be shared. We believe giving schools and teachers empowerment to decide what is best for students will increase achievement.

For this reason beginning in 2014, with the Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement models of change, team development, and performance cultures in place, Bulloch County Schools began training all faculty to establish true district-level, school-level professional learning communities (PLCs). These teams allow teachers to better collaborate and plan across grade levels and academic subjects. No one understands our challenges better than our teachers, so establishing a collaborative, continuous-improvement culture gives us the structure and flexibility to empower teachers to help our students discover success at every level.

PLCs have the potential to positively impact our district in the following ways: Guaranteed and viable curriculum, building leadership capacity, assessments, the RTI and POI processes, grading practices, and schedules. We have witnessed many successes due to increased collaboration among administrators and teachers.