Whether you’re a national corporation or a small private school, you’re faced with the question: What makes for valuable Professional Development?
In our work, we frequently collaborate with organizations to discuss what PD can and should look like. There is a plethora of research on best practices and models for professional learning experiences for educators. But how do we make these experiences rich, sustainable, and personal?
Whether face-to-face or virtual, here are our best practices when we create and design learning experiences.
Professional Learning…
…Is Content-Specific
Professional learning must be content focused. It is important to give learners not just what they need, but also what they want. Taking into account their passion to learn makes the learning experience much more meaningful and helps to ensure that they will take and use what they learn and explore during a session. Content focused professional learning experiences have specific learning goals and are grounded in things like solid instructional practice and seamlessly embedded technology use. These learning experiences must also be structured so that learners can see curriculum and pedagogical connections. People should be able to visualize and then actualize how what they’re learning will intentionally affect students. Helping learners understand impact will create more investment and curiosity.
…Provides Hands-On Time
All professional learning experiences should give learners a chance to actively learn and use content. Educators need time to not only explore resources, information, and tools, but also the time to put these things into practice. Sometimes this is through facilitator led activities and sometimes this is self-paced exploration, modeling learner agency, that results in some type of product that they can immediately use with students. By creating environments where learners are given the chance to actively engage, we are making it safe to take risks, fail forward, and test and iterate ideas.
…Models and Acknowledges Instructional Practice
In planning and facilitating professional learning experiences, we have to model solid pedagogical practice for learners. Modeling these practices allows the learner to see it in action, helping them visualize how to bring the experience to their classroom for their students. We should also include intentionally embedded technology use, time for reflection, and opportunities for both giving and receiving feedback. During a learning experience, be intentional and talk about how the session was designed and the intentions behind its creation, activities, and methods. Decomposing professional learning in this way, in real time, helps people better understand the pedagogical choices behind building the experience. As we create professional learning experiences that model good instructional practice, it is also important to promote learner agency. Learners should have choice and be given opportunities to drive their own learning.
…Promote Collaboration
Professional learning experiences should have time built in where participants can learn from each other. This might be guided or scaffolded learning activities where learners use each others’ expertise and skills to solve problems or design and create new products or understandings, or it may be team challenges that they complete using each other for support. Regardless of how, learners need time to practice collaborating in a safe space. And this doesn’t just apply to face to face learning experiences. When professional learning is provided in a virtual environment, consider how to include synchronous components that allow “all the brains in the room” to be together and connect. This might include webinars, Twitter chats, or live discussions; and regardless of the method, learners can engage and learn so much more through talking to each other and ultimately, building relationships.
…Builds in Time for Feedback and Reflection
During any learning experience, people must have time for both low stakes feedback and to reflect on not only what they’re learning, but how this learning makes them feel, what they will take from it, and how the learning could have been more effective. It can also be helpful to institute a feedback loop to help people monitor implementation of the things they learned. Feedback is also important for the facilitator. Garnering feedback from participants helps to inform the design of professional learning experiences moving forward, and can help us see professional learning as an experience that evolves over time with peoples’ needs and wants.
…Offers Sustained Support and Accountability
Planning and preparing for sustainability can be hard, but is so necessary for any kind of professional learning. When the work is done and the professional learning experience is over, it’s important to leave people with momentum, capacity, and expertise to continue on. In order to create sustainability, professional learning must include coaching and expert support. These should be available throughout the learning process, as well as in the interim between sessions. It is also important to provide follow up to help people implement what they’re learning. Follow up happens throughout the process, but there should be scaffolds in place for this to continue once the learning experience is over. One such scaffold is accountability — which is an important ingredient for growth. Who will help participants stay accountable for their growth and using what they are learning to inform their own practice? Accountability partners can be a wonderful way to institute this type of support, as well as help build collegial relationships and encourage discourse around professional practice and student learning.
…Flexes through Agile Facilitation
It’s essential to remember that while facilitators may determine learning goals for the experience, we must acknowledge that our own intentions being realized isn’t the point — the focus should be on the impact that happens during and after the experience itself. Letting go of our own intentions allows us, as facilitators, to see opportunities to pivot and take advantage of teachable moments. If people have the opportunity to pursue their own learning goals, we have to establish a culture where inquiry is encouraged and practiced.
Of course, the thing that can establish a truly impactful learning experience—and the one most difficult to measure— is the learners’ actual experience of it. How and what does the experience leave learners feeling? When learners leave a PD experience, are they hopeful about the work they will design? Are they optimistic about impacting their students immediately? And perhaps most importantly: do the learners feel that the facilitators believe in them and their future success? Even if they only grasp and carry with them one piece of the whole experience, learners will remember how you made them feel.
I appreciate my PLN, colleagues, and friends for helping me build on my own understanding and beliefs around professional learning experiences. Specifically, I would like to thank Ben Kort, Sean Russell, Laura Cahill, Bev Satterwhite, Brittany Miller, Mark Samberg, Greg Garner, and Kailey Rhodes for their insights.
An alternate version of this post appears on the Clarity Innovations Inc. blog.