Ensuring That PD Sessions Really Help Teachers Improve

I’ve sat through plenty of professional development (PD) sessions that left me itching to try out something new in my classroom. They’re the sessions where the feedback in the room is positive; where teachers nod along, ask good questions, and leave feeling energized.

But in the time between the session’s end and the start of the next school day, something can happen to that learning. Quite simply, it can get lost.

Often, it’s a matter of time. As soon as teachers walk out the PD session’s door, they’re likely thinking about tomorrow’s lesson or that student who needs extra support. Where can they find the time to try out something new?

But sometimes it’s not time that’s the problem. Sometimes, it’s the challenge of transferring the new ideas from one context to another and practicing them for long enough. This gap between the learning and the doing can widen to the point that teachers don’t actually try out what they’ve learned, or they give up on the new strategy too quickly because it isn’t working right away.

When I took on more responsibility for our school’s PD program, I wanted to find a way to make sure that the content we covered in our sessions actually stuck: I wanted to see evidence of our sessions in classrooms not just the next day, but months after.

The CRITERIA That HELP MAKE PD STICK

I established two criteria for professional development sessions to help me achieve the goal of making the content stick: practicing on real material and protecting teachers’ bandwidth.

1. Practice on real, relevant material. The first criterion is to give teachers the opportunity to practice the skills and strategies they are learning about in PD. Just as our students need multiple opportunities to practice a new skill and get feedback to improve, teachers do too.

Previously, most of our PD sessions involved teachers sitting and listening rather than actively participating. I began shifting this approach to one in which teachers get multiple opportunities to practice new techniques with colleagues. Sometimes, this looks like one teacher using the strategy in front of everyone else, getting feedback from other teachers on how best to utilize the approach. Other times, it can look like teachers working together to adapt lesson plans to better align with new approaches we’ve explored in a PD session.

For example, during a session on learning objectives, I started by introducing the topic and then quickly moved into active, real classroom-context practice. After learning objectives were introduced, teachers worked together to complete a sorting activity in which they separated well-written learning objectives from poorly written ones. Teachers were looking at examples from their own grade levels and subjects I had prepared to ensure that the activity felt relevant to their individual contexts.

After the sorting activity, I gave teachers dedicated time to look at their upcoming lesson plans and adjust their learning objectives as needed. After writing learning objectives that better aligned with the well-written versions we had explored through sorting, teachers shared their updated objectives with one another for feedback.

Rather than just sitting and listening to what effective learning objectives are, teachers got to actively explore different versions of objectives and build an understanding of what effective means in practice. From there, teachers got to apply their new learning directly to their own lessons, making the information they learned not only useful in theory, but useful immediately.

In addition to helping teachers take a more active role in their learning, and giving them a tangible new skill (well-written learning objectives) to bring to their lessons right away, this PD session embedded multiple opportunities for teachers to work collaboratively. This helps build positive relationships across the school while also reminding all teachers that they are doing this work together.

Throughout the entire session, teachers had the opportunity to try out the new skill in a low-stakes environment, working through any challenges together. Plus, I was able to walk around to different classrooms and see the evidence of learning that was demonstrated through strong learning objectives, not just the next day, but for weeks and months after.

2. Protect bandwidth. The second condition is to protect teachers’ bandwidth. In education, there’s always something to improve or try; one week the focus is learning objectives, the next social and emotional learning, and so on. Teachers can end up bouncing from one theme to another, without the breathing space to try anything new.

So, there are two ways I plan PD so that it doesn’t overload teachers. The first is to make sure the topic is something teachers can apply immediately. They don’t need to do any research or additional reading outside of the session, just adapt it to their own classroom and students.

The second way is to protect the focus itself. In the same way that students need time and repeated practice for new learning to shift into long-term memory, teachers need sustained repetition to embed a new practice into their teaching.

After the learning-objectives PD session I ran, learning objectives became our focus for the month. It was what each of our school leaders looked for when popping into classes, celebrating and sharing best practice in our teachers’ bulletin.

The sustained focus meant the quality of learning objectives improved, while their visibility in classes jumped from 30 to 70 percent in one week alone. Most important, students started to ask what they were learning in classes, and they were able to reflect more deeply on their success.

By ensuring that PD sessions have a clear focus, and that teachers have time to work on one new skill or strategy for enough time to make progress, our school has been able to make PD sessions more impactful and the learning more readily transferable to classrooms.

Now, when I’m planning a PD session, I ask myself two questions: Does this session allow teachers to practice, not just listen? And have I protected enough time after the session for this to become a habit? If I can say yes to both, I can feel more confident that the PD will stick.