Scaling Up When Only One Teacher Attends PD

When you attend an inspiring professional development (PD) session by yourself, you feel energized and excited as if you’ve seen the sun for the first time. However, getting other people onboard can be tricky. Knowing the best approach is important, especially since there seems to be a rise in schools sending lone attendees to PD.

Tightening budgets often mean that funds for PD are reduced. This could be due to the cost of getting substitutes, sustaining other initiatives, or other district-level decisions. I’ve seen this in my own district. Increasing restrictions on PD spending often means that sending teams of teachers to a professional development opportunity isn’t very common anymore.

As a result, we’ve had to do what teachers in many other districts do—get creative by leveraging the experience of individual staff members who can attend PD sessions for the benefit of those who can’t.

So, what can be done to ensure that schools can scale professional learning? Consider the following five approaches, essentially on a continuum, that incrementally require more time and investment from teachers. There’s no right or wrong approach—every school has different amounts of time or capacity for committing to new ideas. You can always start with one as a way to test the waters before trying a more involved approach.

1. The ‘Lighthouse’ MODEL

If your goal is to use a singular PD experience as a way to inspire a change in staff or invite greater experimentation/adoption within your school, the most effective way to do this is to find an opportunity for your lone attendee to get in front of the staff and share the takeaways from their experience.

Do this at the start of a staff meeting or as part of an in-service day. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t take much time away from the established topics or goal of the meeting. You can gauge, in real time, the interest level of your staff and gather questions that could inform a more dedicated rollout.

Again, the idea here is to put your attendee in a highly visible place so that, like a lighthouse, they can attract other interested staff members, who can support each other in adopting the change.

2. The ‘Family Vacation’ Model

There’s always a family member who wants to sit you down and swipe through all of the photos from their recent vacation. This same approach can be used to spur innovation at your school in a low-stakes and low-commitment manner.

PD opportunities usually come with additional resources, many of which are sharable. Leveraging this fact for greater dissemination is easy to do. Invite your lone attendee to create a document with links or a short presentation of their learning. Have them emphasize strategies or concepts with high “tryability.” This will spur experimentation.

Unlike the Lighthouse approach, the Family Vacation model uses the resources or presentation as the launching point to set a shared expectation or “ask” that the audience commits to trying and reflecting on at a later date. This raises the commitment level, but it helps move the strategy from something that a few people might do to something that the staff or a department owns together.

3. The ‘Lab Classroom’ Model

Although the Family Vacation model moves from scattered implementation to group or schoolwide implementation effectively, it doesn’t provide an opportunity to investigate the potential of classroom adoption. Also, some staff might be skeptical of ideas that haven’t been implemented in their own context. A Lab Classroom approach might be a better model to follow.

This approach focuses on how PD attendees are often inspired by their experience to implement the approaches in their classrooms. Their classes can then be used as places to observe the strategies or tools within the actual context of your school. What’s more, you can combine this strategy with familiar approaches such as peer observations, co-teaching, or other established methods that your school uses.

4. The ‘Trained Trainer’ Model

If you feel confident that your lone attendee’s experience would add value to your school and want to start building capacity, your best bet might be to have them serve as the in-school expert. In this model, an individual or small group attends a workshop and then comes back to the school, where they train school staff. Some PD experiences are designed specifically with a trained trainer model in mind. Caution—it’s very situational and not always a viable solution for creating systemic change.

While a Trained Trainer model might seem like an economical way to build staff capacity, it can be a hindrance. Attending a workshop doesn’t automatically equip someone with the expertise required to address all of the challenges that come from implementation. As in a game of telephone, things can get lost or misconstrued in translation. Make sure to pair your trainer with static materials like a book or curricular resource that they can consult.

A Trained Trainer model paired with a book study can be very effective at building group capacity. For example, a middle school teacher who came back from the annual California Association for Leading Innovation in Education (formerly CUE) conference attended a session on EduProtocols and used what she experienced (along with a book) to help her fellow teachers adopt the protocols as part of their own practice.

5. The ‘Champion’ Model

If you’re committed to building systemic change or adoption beginning with a single person and are willing to dedicate additional staff and time, the Champion model might be best for your school. This model builds on the Trained Trainer approach by providing your sole PD attendee or source of expertise with a dedicated team that collectively owns and promotes the rollout. They work as a committee to plan the gradual adoption, facilitate staff learning, and answer all the what-if questions that inevitably pop up. You can put a team together in different ways: inviting only those who are interested, tapping people from a variety of experience or grade levels, or looking outside of the classroom at support staff or admin. Do whatever you think is best for creating a groundswell of support.

The Champion model has many advantages. It ensures that the burden of responsibility is a group endeavor. That allows for better collaboration and problem-solving. It also future-proofs the initiative in case somebody moves or gets promoted. Additionally, the more people who are on board with an initiative, the more quickly it can become integrated into the culture of the school.

All of these models require administrators to use creative thinking. It is the key to ensuring that the lone expert and/or the teams that support them have the time and resources they need. Most important, educators will be willing to dedicate their time and energy to this work when they know that their work is valued.