High-Quality Teachers
HISD enables knowledgeable professionals in the private sector to become teachers through the Alternative Certification Program; offers sign-on bonuses to teachers in such critical-shortage areas as math, science, bilingual education, and Special Education; and recruits qualified bilingual teachers from other nations.

Performance-Pay Program
The teachers who produce the most improvement in their students' academic achievement can earn up to $7,000 in bonus pay, and eventually as much as $10,000.

Professional Learning Communities
Everyone on campus helps to improve teaching and learning, with established strategies improved or better aligned and new ones developed.

Differentiated Pay
To improve math and science instruction districtwide, HISD is developing a separate pay plan designed to recruit and retain high-performing math and science teachers, so that they share their expertise with HISD rather than another school district or the private sector.

Professional Development
HISD provides current teachers with a wide variety of professional-development opportunities designed to enrich their classroom instruction and interaction with students. These include workshops on instructional and administrative leadership, safety, crisis intervention and responses, and social issues such as poverty.

Teacher Leaders
To help teachers have a greater impact on the entire learning community, HISD enables them to serve on campus-based decision-making committees and the Superintendent of Schools’ ad-hoc committees, become team leaders on their campuses, and train new teachers at their schools