Strategic Planning and the Future of PDK Membership

We wanted to "re-print" Dr. James Lane's column from the December/January edition of Kappan. Starting in spring 2025, we'll be following a new publication schedule for Kappan.

My focus of late, and that of the board, has been on setting the new strategic direction for PDK International. This work helps us set the stage for the coming years as we work even harder to support you and the teaching profession at large. I want to thank the board for their energy and support as we forge ahead with exciting plans for the organization. As educator shortages have persisted, PDK has remained at the forefront of research and policy around the teaching profession, and our updated strategic plan will continue to build on that focus of preparing future educators for success.

We started our strategic planning process by looking at the organization’s mission, vision, and core values. What became apparent to us over and over is how important our work with Educators Rising has become. We also wanted to honor the legacy of what PDK has meant to so many educators over such a long period of time. Our new vision is to?eliminate the teacher shortage by reimagining educator pathways. This puts our work supporting rising educators front and center. A vision is an aspirational rationale for why an organization exists. An organization’s mission is what it does, day to day, to help realize that vision. Our new mission is to?inspire and grow current and rising educators to become community leaders and advocates for high quality education. This focus on both current and future educators allows us to also continue our amazing work in PDK and?Kappan?to offer research and solutions to support those working in our schools while we continue to grow new educators in Educators Rising.

As still a relatively new leader of the organization, I bring to this work my experience in leading through core values, which are an excellent instrument in helping to unify and focus an organization’s staff. It was important to me that we have conversations among staff and the board together around the importance of core values, which can provide us a moral compass around difficult decisions. An organization that is in alignment with core values can more easily work effectively, which is especially important in our case, as many of our staff work remotely in locations across the U.S.

These values include?service,?leadership,?community,?optimism, and?excellence. Some of these are not new to PDK. Some are a refinement from our organization’s last set of core values. Over the next few editions of this column, I plan to dig in and unpack these, but I wanted to focus on the first value of service with you now. By including?service as one of our core values, we aspire to high standards of service and experience for our members, staff, and stakeholders in the education community. It’s highly important to me that every experience you have with us is a good one and that you find value in your investment with us as a member.

To get better at service, communication is paramount. As always, I’d encourage you to reach out to us with any thoughts, whether it is praise or concern. We exist to serve your needs as a member of the educational community. The more we learn about what we are doing right and how we can improve, the better we’ll be at working in alignment with our core value of service.

As we look to 2025, like many membership organizations in recent years, we have had to grapple with the growing costs of our high-quality publications. And the answer is clear, we have much larger readership in the online versions of?Kappan, so we must transition to providing content where our readers are in the most cost-effective way. We have also remained committed to keeping membership costs the same. So, the good news is that our membership costs will not increase next year.?

To keep membership dues the same while meeting our readers in their most preferred medium, however, we have made the decision to reduce the number of printed copies of?Kappan?to four issues per year. While this means fewer overall paper editions coming to your mailbox, it will not mean a reduction in the content you see from?Kappan. We will continue to provide digital content to our members at the same quality and at greater frequency than you saw in the paper magazine. There will be new articles published throughout the year at kappanonline.org. Again, we will not reduce the amount of content you receive but present it in a different format.

We recognize the long-standing reputation of this journal and its importance to our membership and beyond. This decision was not made lightly, but in alignment with our new core values. While other membership organizations have ceased publication of their journals and magazines, we know how much you value our content, so by putting all of our content online on a more regular basis, we can still honor our long tradition of connecting research, policy, and practice while also taking the necessary steps to operate our magazine more efficiently and in the medium where readers access it the most — digitally. In 2025, you can expect new print issues to arrive in March, May, September, and December.

Finally, alongside our strategic planning work, PDK International is launching a new membership tier, available to educators of distinction, called PDK Prestige. This new membership tier will grant award-winning educators access to the online version of?Kappan, in addition to the ability to participate in future networking events. While this tier does not include all of the many benefits of PDK Professional membership (such as our new Teaching Channel benefit), it is one way we’d like to give back to the community. If you know an educator who has been honored in your community as a “teacher of the year,” “employee of the year,” or other similar distinction, we’d invite them to join PDK Prestige at no cost this year and hopefully forever. Details can be found on the PDK website.

— James F. Lane, Ed.D., Chief Executive, PDK International