Getting Professional Development Right

Getting professional development (PD) right is no easy feat. I will never forget how, as a teacher swamped with planning, grading, parent communication, and administrative requirements, an unengaging or irrelevant PD made me feel like my already limited time was being siphoned away into oblivion. To be clear, not all professional development was lackluster. In fact, some sessions were formative for me. But when PD was bad, it was bad.

I am now a curriculum supervisor and facilitator of professional development in my district, and I always keep my experience as a teacher at the forefront of decision-making and instructional planning. This past school year, I planned and facilitated PD on a far more regular basis than in years prior, and the feedback I’ve received from teachers has been overwhelmingly positive. Here’s what I’ve learned about how to get PD right.

5 Keys to Successful Professional Development

1. Determine which data should drive development. How do you identify the most appropriate learning opportunities for the teachers in your school or district? Spoiler alert: The answer is data. Whether it’s data derived from student achievement, teacher evaluations or walk-throughs, or teacher surveys or feedback, determining the appropriate data point(s) to drive the professional development of your teachers is critical for both growth and growth measures.

In my district, our leadership team transparently prioritized weekly walk-through data with a goal of K–12 growth in instructional alignment. All professional learning opportunities throughout the school year were then anchored in this focus. From September to June, we were able to measure and track alignment in our classrooms, while targeting sessions for our faculty each month based on the data.

2. Provide teachers with choice. For me, a strong foundation for building meaningful professional development for any group of teachers involves choice. Teachers have varying levels of experience, a diversity of strengths, and a range of different needs. Blanketing all teachers with the same professional development denies your team the opportunity to zero in on specific areas of growth.

Choice is also central to cultivating a culture of autonomy for teachers. Every leader and leadership team seeking to support the development of highly effective educators should understand and embrace the immense value of teacher autonomy. Teacher autonomy plays a direct role in teacher motivation and teacher job satisfaction. In other words, choice increases a drive in performance and decreases faculty turnover.

Some of our choice sessions this year were based on teacher request, such as trauma-informed instruction, differentiating for multilingual learners, neurodiversity, and restorative classroom practices. Best practice choice sessions led by teachers and administrators included writing workshops, lesson launches, gamifying lessons, and interdisciplinary approaches to instruction.

3. Andragogy (the way adults learn) is not the same as pedagogy. One more thing about choice: Furnishing your faculty with professional development options promotes buy-in. Effective engagement is more likely when adults have a sense of self-direction. Adults do not learn the same way as children learn. The planning and facilitating of adult learning should always include an understanding of the key differences between andragogy and pedagogy.

One of the most common mistakes I see in PD spaces is treating a room full of adults like a classroom of children. In fact, when I first began leading PD as a teacher, my planning process and approach mirrored my middle school social studies classroom. I made the mistake of speaking to my colleagues as if I were speaking to my students. Consequently, I’m grateful that one of those colleagues gave me that feedback, allowing me to apologize and course-correct. Planning and facilitating PD with an andragogical approach has most impacted the way I structure each session, the ratio of facilitator “spotlight” to teacher thought work, the activities we engage in, and my language as a facilitator.

4. Skip the lecture. Create the conditions for high-quality interaction. No teacher wants to sit and listen to a lecture. Thus, interaction is essential. However, interaction alone cannot be the aim. For instance, icebreakers can get a crowd moving and speaking to one another, but this degree of interactivity alone is not sufficient. (Also, icebreakers are not always done well.)

For me, high-quality professional learning activities take into account the following components, among others, of an andragogical approach: (1) relevance, (2) a chance for trial-and-error, and (3) problem-solving.

Here’s how I planned this kind of activity for one of my sessions last year. The goal was for teachers to use high-quality objectives to drive aligned lessons, activities, and assessments. Teachers formed groups, and we jumped into a “Lesson Plan Puzzle.”

Each group of teachers was presented with a large manila envelope. Every envelope contained the following: (1) an English language arts (ELA) or social studies standard, an objective based on the standard, and a revised high-quality objective; (2) two different do-nows or warm-ups; (3) three lesson activities; and (4) two exit tickets. Groups were tasked with choosing the most effective line-up, from warm-up to activity to exit ticket. Afterward, we discussed our choices and rested on a shared understanding of the most aligned puzzle.

• Relevance: Participants included ELA and social studies teachers. I designed an ELA puzzle and social studies puzzle with specific content relevant to all teachers who attended.
• Trial-and-error: Some of the activities were designed to be misaligned. Others included multiple activities that all aligned. The rationale behind the use of each activity determined the outcome, rather than the activity itself. There was extensive room for error; as a result, productive disagreement and engaging teacher-led discussion ensued.
• Problem-solving: The activity itself was a puzzle. The learning task was problem-based, rather than content-based.

5. Embrace feedback from teachers. Professional development is incomplete without feedback from teachers. Feedback is incredibly useful as both an assessment tool to measure the effectiveness of each session and a data-gathering method to identify teacher needs based on teacher requests for learning opportunities. Our team can home in on the various components of each session (clear objectives, content delivery, quality of activities, etc.) from month to month through feedback surveys administered after every PD. We are also able to target future choice sessions based on the requests we receive from teachers at each survey or feedback administration.

If we want our teachers to want to be present at every professional development opportunity on the district calendar, we must seek out teacher feedback and, just as important, be willing to make adjustments based on what they tell us.