Maximizing Your School’s Professional Learning Plan: 5 Questions Worth Asking

Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes

Building a strong professional learning plan for any community  is real and important work, and most school and district leaders and coaches doing it well are drawing on more than one partner to cover the range of needs in the community. 

Our Teachers College Advancing Literacy team of staff developers works with our partner schools and districts to identify goals and develop plans to support growth for teachers that is lasting, practical, and joyful. As we develop plans for various projects, we consider the key structures that make any part of a professional development (PD) plan actually hold, so the work you're already putting into this year pays off long past each session. 

1. Is This a One-Time Event, or Part of Something Sustained?

Darling-Hammond, Hyler, and Gardner (2017) reviewed 35 studies of teacher professional development and found that effective PD is sustained over time, not delivered in a single session. A single day, however well designed, rarely changes practice on its own, since teachers need time to try a new approach, hit a snag, and get support before the idea fully takes hold.

What to put in place: A plan for what happens after the initial session, whether that's a follow-up date already on the calendar, a coach checking in, or a set time to revisit the work with your team. If you're working with us, this is exactly what our multi-session courses and ongoing partnerships are built around, so it's worth confirming which structure your team is in and making sure the follow-up sessions are protected on everyone's calendar now, not scheduled reactively later.

2. Does the PD Plan Include Active Practice, or Only Presentation?

The same review found that active learning, teachers actually trying out new strategies rather than only listening to them described, is one of the strongest predictors of whether PD changes classroom practice.

What to put in place: Time built into the session, or protected right after it, for teachers to actually try the strategy: analyze student work together, practice a routine with a colleague, plan a lesson they'll teach that week. Practice works best when it's low-stakes. Teachers take more risks and learn faster when trying something new is treated as rehearsal, not performance, so it helps to say so explicitly. Create a space to try the strategy imperfectly, not to be evaluated on how well it goes the first time. Learning happens in that application, not in the room where it was first introduced.

3. Is this PD Connected to What Your Team Is Already Doing?

Desimone (2009) found that PD is more likely to affect instruction when it is coherent with a teacher's existing curriculum, standards, and goals, rather than being added to everything else as one more thing for teachers to reconcile. When PD assumes a blank slate, or worse, conflicts with what a curriculum already asks teachers to do, teachers end up doing the reconciling work themselves, often without the time or authority to do it well.

What to put in place: A clear, explicit line from the PD to what teachers are already doing in their classrooms this year. That line is easiest to draw when it's part of the plan from the start rather than left for teachers to infer. If you're coordinating more than one PD provider, this is also where a leader's view across the whole plan matters most: a session on vocabulary and a session on comprehension should reinforce each other, not compete for the same instructional minutes. If a connection isn't obvious to teachers on their own, coordinate with your staff developer or coach so it gets named directly.

4. Does the PD Plan Include Coaching or Expert Support After the Session?

Darling-Hammond, Hyler, and Gardner (2017) also found that coaching and expert support, someone available to help teachers apply what they learned in their own classroom, meaningfully strengthens the impact of PD. A single day of training tends to fade once teachers hit the first real obstacle back in their own classroom, unless there's somewhere to bring that obstacle.

What to put in place: A known, named point of contact for questions that come up weeks after a session, not just during it. That could be a coach who visits classrooms, a scheduled check-in call, or simply an email address that a teacher knows will get a real answer within a day or two. Make sure teachers actually know who that person is and how to reach them well before they need it, since support that exists on paper but isn't visible to teachers in the moment doesn't get used.

5. Does the PD Match the Specific Needs of Your Team?

The most effective PD is content-focused and tailored to what a specific group of teachers actually needs. A team of new teachers, a team of veteran teachers looking to refine an established practice, and a team split across multiple grade bands each benefit from something a little different, even when they're working on the same broad topic. Keep in mind that groupings for professional learning need not always be by grade band, and that groups can be viewed flexibly depending on the strengths, needs, and interests of your team. 

What to put in place: A conversation, early in the year, about where your team actually is right now is instrumental Discuss what they've already tried, where the gaps are, and what they feel would have an impact on their teaching and students’ learning versus what would simply repeat what they know. The more specific that picture is going into the year, the more useful each session can be, and the easier it becomes to tell your PD partners what your team actually needs rather than defaulting to a standard offering.

The Five Point Checklist to Maximize Professional Development

As you finalize this year's professional development plan, is it:

• Sustained beyond a single session, with follow-up already scheduled?

• Built around active practice, not just presentation?

• Coherent with your current curriculum and instructional goals?

• Backed by a named coach or school-based point of contact for ongoing questions?

• Shaped around your team's specific content goals and unique makeup this year?

Bring This Work to Your School

If you want to talk through how to structure this year for the best return on the PD you've chosen, or you're still deciding what fits, our team is glad to help. for a defined, in-depth experience on a specific topic, explore our for something ongoing and flexible across the year, or reach out about our to build something around your school's specific goals.

References

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective teacher professional development. Learning Policy Institute.

Desimone, L. M. (2009). Improving impact studies of teachers' professional development: Toward better conceptualizations and measures. Educational Researcher, 38(3), 181-199.