Teaching the Teachers: What Professional Development and Higher Ed Can Learn from Each Other (Part One)

In most experiences for both professional development for teachers and instruction in higher ed classrooms, there is a spectrum of how well they actually support shifting practice. In both spaces, I have had spaces where I came out feeling like I have almost come out of a cathartic experience that changed my practice and made me feel energized… and then there’s the other end: I came out feeling like my brain was atrophied and I list the 8,000 things I could have been able to do that would be more helpful to my students… less of a cathartic experience sans giving me even more impetus to be better and do better.

What Good Professional Development Nails (Respectfully)

• Good PD lets learners bring their own lived experience instead of leaving it at the door.

I’ve led PD for years — across grade levels, content areas, and school types. I’ve never walked into a 5th grade math training pretending to know more than the teacher in the room. Because I didn’t. I knew that, and they knew that.

What I do bring to professional learning even now outside of a K-12 environment is a deep understanding of high-yield instructional strategies — strategies that work in real classrooms with real kids. 

That doesn’t matter, though, if I don’t believe that teachers are experts in their own spaces and treat them that way.

That’s the kind of PD that sticks. That’s what builds trust.  That’s what actually leads to change.

When you model respect for teachers' lived experiences — and invite those experiences into the session — it shifts the room. It tells teachers: You already know things that matter. Let’s build from there.

Good PD doesn’t squash teacher voice. 

It amplifies it.

• Good PD builds a foundation in theory that matters — the kind that shapes your why, not just your test scores.

  
  

  Before you throw your computer, educators — I’m not coming for you. I’m coming for your administrators, and I say this with love:

  
  

  Stop asking teachers what their Why is.

  
  

  We know why. It goes deeper than “showing up for kids.” It’s layered, personal, and often unspoken. Asking that question again and again — especially without offering real support — starts to feel like gaslighting.

  
  

  If you want to talk about a why, here’s the only one that matters right now:

  
  

  Why are teachers expected to do this? Where did this initiative come from? What’s the actual research behind it?

  
  

  “Because we want to be top 10 in the state” is not a why.

  
  

  It’s a slogan.

  
  

  And it’s not powerful enough to keep teachers engaged — or coming back.

  
  

• Good PD gives teachers something they can actually use.

  
  

  As a teacher, I dreamed of professional development that was something I could use immediately and without having to completely redo everything.

  
  

  The most significant time I had professional learning that I took something from that was actually applicable and affected me deeply for the rest of my career was an instructional coach who taught me about Emily Mofield’s book Strategies for Advanced Learners. She modeled strategies for us out of the book that we could use with students, and she walked around and talked to us about it.

  
  

  I won’t say how long into my career that was, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I took that moment from that coach – presenting knowledge and research, modeling it for us as we would do it in the classroom – and then she came to our rooms and watched us do it.

  
  

  I learned a good strategy for my stint in admin from her. 

  
  

  They’re not distracted by how many times you use certain buzzwords, keeping a tally in their heads instead of listening to you. They don’t disassociate from a 75-slide deck.

  They get real tools. Real strategies. Stuff they can try tomorrow without rewriting their entire unit plan.

  
  

  Side note: I use that book to this day in my consulting work at least twice a month. 

  
  

  THAT is effective PD.

  
  

• Good PD is interactive in a way that doesn’t make people want to go to the restroom just to get out of it.

  
  

  It’s structured.

  
  

  It’s thoughtful.

  
  

  It’s not forced fun or group projects or chart paper or Padlets or Parking Lots or whatever other no-longer-trendy routine present in a lot of professional learning.

  
  

  It respects time, energy, and attention — and gives something back.

What Good Higher Ed Nails

• Higher Ed provides readings with tasks and gives you time to wrestle with them and reflect.

Effective professors don’t read a slide deck and give you a test with no feedback and call it a day. They give you material that is applicable to what you’re doing – directly applicable, not just something they saw on Instagram they think is cool – provide a (sometimes brief, sometimes more extensive) task, and then give honest time for discussion, either through the form of an online discussion forum or discussion time in class.

The majority of thoughts students have are divergent: all based in fact or proven theory, but with the possibility (hopefully) of applying it differently in different scenarios. This results in building of knowledge as a Big Idea, not just simply memorizing what war was when – knowledge that helps you when you are older on Jeopardy! but doesn’t stick meaningfully otherwise. 

• Higher Ed treats students like thinkers, specifically in the realm of data.

When was the last time a professor gave students a spreadsheet of data and told them to look at it and figure out how to fix it with no direction?

I took two stats courses (loved every minute of it), and when presented with data, we were first taught – effectively – how to look at it. Examples were worked. We were given time to practice one skill at a time. Ask questions. We were then able to take the skills and concepts we learned and apply it to new learning, either in the form of homework or our dissertations, and we received feedback there, too. 

We weren’t handed colorful spreadsheets and told to fill in the blanks or fix the scores with no context. 

We learned the why, the process, and the application.

Higher ed nails that part. K-12, take note.

• Highed Ed values cumulative learning.

There is a course catalog at every university that has gen ed courses for everyone, and then it shifts into majors and minors with pre-requisites and advanced specialized courses. It takes work on the back end to create these, but after the original one is done, it’s simple adjustments year to year to keep it current/reflective of what students need to know for that specific industry. 

Professional Development – in my dream world – follows this same path. (I would love the honor of partnering with a district on this idea. If you’re interested, reach out. I have brainstormed and would love to chat.)

Higher ed nails program of study. 

K-12 would be wise to mimic that style of cumulative, personalized learning.

Coming Later this Week – Part 2: Teaching Teachers, both Present and Future: Adult Learning Theory Applies to Both

• Adults need relevance.

  
  

• They need choice.

  
  

• They need to be seen as capable.

  
  

• And they need to know the why behind what they’re learning.

Bottom Line

The best learning environments — whether it’s a PD or a Saturday grad class — treat people like humans first, thinkers always.

Want teachers to change their practice?

Be the model of the teacher you want to see in your school. (Adaptation from my own work - an article for NAESP)