Too often, professional learning is just another compliance activity. We call it “professional development,” yet the experience rarely feels professional. Instead, it often feels passive and disconnected from what educators truly need: time, agency, and experiences that respect how adults actually learn.
But if we shift the design, we immediately see a difference. In one districtwide professional development session I participated in, teachers sat silently through hours of slides. Later, in a breakout session where we incorporated gallery walks, stand-up protocols, and structured walk-and-talks, the room came alive. Conversations sparked. Ideas flowed. The content hadn’t changed. The shift happened because the design respected adult learners as professionals with brains and bodies that require movement.
If we want to put the “professional” back in professional development, we must reimagine learning as an active process that energizes educators, models effective practice, and leads to lasting change in classrooms.
The Problem with Chairs
Professional development often ignores a fundamental truth: adults don’t learn well when confined to chairs. Research shows that physical activity boosts cognitive function, mood, and retention, yet many educators spend long portions of the workday sitting during meetings, planning, grading, and professional learning sessions, reflecting broader patterns of sedentary work in modern professions. Prolonged sitting is associated with burnout, anxiety, and reduced capacity to apply new knowledge, whereas neuroscience research demonstrates how physical movement increases blood flow, oxygen, and neurochemical activity in the brain, which supports attention, memory, and learning.
This understanding of how movement can benefit our learning is not new. Research on student learning has long highlighted the link between movement and cognition. The Total Physical Response method, developed by James Asher, is grounded in the idea that learners acquire language more effectively when movement is paired with meaning. Although originally applied to children and multilingual learners, the principle applies just as strongly to adults in professional settings. People just learn better when they move.
Professional development often ignores a fundamental truth: adults don’t learn well when confined to chairs.
Moving—By Design
Movement in professional learning is often limited to a warm-up or a break. But we should be treating movement as a design principle. Movement enables educators to process information differently, engage multiple modalities, and make connections that stick.
Practical strategies for incorporating movement into PD include:
- Gallery walks, where participants analyze student work or protocols.
- Walk-and-talks, where partners discuss prompts while walking, then return to record their insights.
- Four corners voting, a strategy where participants are asked a question and then move to a part of the room with the answer they agree or identify most with. This activity surfaces beliefs or challenges before deeper discussion occurs.
- Station rotations, where small groups explore new concepts in different contexts.
When participants engage with content physically and socially, they activate more than their memory. They bring lived experiences into the room, build connections with peers, and internalize strategies more deeply. This is not about novelty. It’s about neuroscience.
By the time we reconvened, the group had generated more ideas in 20 minutes of walking than they typically did in an hour of sitting.
Learning on the Move
I once worked with a team of secondary math teachers who struggled with engaging multilingual learners in group discussions. Instead of lecturing about strategies, we created a professional learning station rotation. At one stop, teachers acted out a word problem as a sequence of movements before representing it symbolically. At another, they used role-play to practice scaffolding math talk with sentence frames. By the final station, they were applying the ideas to their own lesson plans. Teachers later shared that they remembered the strategies more clearly because they had experienced them with their whole bodies.
In another district, principals participated in a professional learning walk. Each stop around the building focused on a different leadership move, such as providing feedback, protecting instructional time, or observing for equity. Principals reflected with partners at each stop and left with concrete commitments. The activity was engaging and modeled exactly what they could replicate with their own staff.
Even small changes can make a difference. During a session on literacy instruction, I paired teachers for a walking conversation about student talk. Each pair circled the building, then switched partners, which resulted in many new insights. By the time we reconvened, the group had generated more ideas in 20 minutes of walking than they typically did in an hour of sitting.
In a suburban district, a professional development day on culturally responsive teaching included a “living timeline” activity. Teachers each received a key historical or cultural event related to education equity. They arranged themselves across the length of the cafeteria, discussed connections among events, and reflected on how these legacies still shape student experiences today. The activity gave staff a powerful visual sense of continuity and responsibility.
Finally, at another session, instructional coaches designed a gallery walk that doubled as collaborative planning time. Around the room, chart paper displayed common instructional challenges, such as supporting reluctant writers, integrating technology, or structuring small-group learning. Teams rotated, adding strategies, sticky notes, and resources at each stop. By the end, participants had co-created a bank of solutions reflecting collective expertise that they could apply immediately in classrooms.
Walk the Talk
If we want classrooms to be active, collaborative, and student-centered, then professional learning must reflect those same values. Incorporating movement in learning isn’t chaos or simply a gimmick—it’s purposeful design. When educators experience walk-and-talks, gallery walks, and collaborative rotations, they see how powerful these strategies can be. In one survey I conducted, more than 85 percent of staff reported feeling more engaged and energized when movement was embedded in the experience, and nearly 70 percent reported using movement strategies subsequently with students.
When leaders integrate movement and collaboration into PD, they send a clear message: your time, wellness, and growth matter. Leading in this way is not just responsive. It’s visionary. It creates space for sustained change, healthier staff, and classrooms where students benefit from the modeling their teachers have experienced.
The fact is, for both teachers and students, the best learning never sits still.
