The Professional Development Your Teachers Sit Through Is Probably 50% Irrelevant

Last August, I asked a room of 30 teachers to raise their hand if they had ever sat through a full-day PD and walked away thinking: that had nothing to do with what I actually do.

Every hand went up.

Not halfway. Not hesitantly. All of them.

Most PD facilitators are skilled, experienced, and deeply committed to what they do. This is a systems problem. We’ve built a professional development infrastructure that defaults to generic because generic scales. One presenter, one room, one message, sent out to an entire school or district.

The problem is that the person designing the session doesn’t know who’s in the room.

A third-year special education teacher in a high-poverty school working with four students on IEPs and running a co-taught classroom does not need the same PD as a twenty-year veteran teaching AP English at a suburban high school.

But… we put them in the same room, give them the same presentation, and wonder why teacher engagement in professional development is at an all-time low.

Here is exactly how to structure your PD days so they are relevant to everyone in your building, including paras, SPED and other non-core subject staff:
(and if you want us to send you a custom PD plan, you can click here)

(1) Start with teacher context, not content delivery.