A few years ago, I walked into a school library where 130 teachers were gathered for a mandatory after-school PD session. The facilitator, a well-intentioned district leader, was clicking briskly through a 72-slide deck. Every slide was packed with text. Every slide introduced a new initiative, a new strategy, or a new requirement. After about 12 minutes, people began checking their phones, whispering to a colleague, or staring at a distant spot above the facilitator’s head. After 18 minutes, I found myself doing the same.
At one point, a teacher leaned toward me and whispered, “I just need one thing I can actually use tomorrow.”
I’ve heard that same sentiment for two decades. It reflects what a substantial body of research confirms: Most PD is not ineffective because teachers lack commitment or curiosity. It’s ineffective because it’s designed without regard for the people in the room. A major meta-analysis of over 900 studies on educator learning found that effective PD is focused, ongoing, and directly relevant to teachers’ immediate needs (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). Yet many PD experiences do the opposite—too much content crammed into too little time, unclear outcomes, and little attention to the emotional or cognitive states of the adults asked to take in the information.
To create PD that works, we must start earlier and begin with people.
1. Know Your People
When I ask leaders how they plan PD, most begin by listing the content they need to cover. It’s an understandable impulse, given the pressures educators face, but it’s not the most generative starting point. The better first question is: Who are the learners in front of me today, and what do they most need?
This is not “soft” work—it is grounded in cognitive science. Adult learning theorists such as Malcolm Knowles (1984) and Patricia Cranton (2006) have shown for decades that adults learn best when they feel respected, emotionally safe, and connected to the learning. Neuroscience reinforces this: Stress, overwhelm, and emotional dysregulation reduce the brain’s ability to take in new information. When facilitators jump straight into content without understanding the humans in the room, they inadvertently undermine learning before it begins.
When PD designers skip “knowing your people,” a few predictable problems emerge:
- Cognitive overload: In the absence of understanding participants’ prior knowledge or emotional readiness, sessions get packed with far too much content.
- Unclear learning outcomes: Without clarity about what teachers need most, facilitators try to cover everything, which means nothing lands.
- Low relevance: Even excellent strategies fall flat when teachers can’t see how they connect to their context, grade level, or current reality.
The antidote is simple. Begin with connection.
A teacher leaned toward me and whispered, "I just need one thing I can actually use tomorrow."
A three- to five-minute check-in can transform the learning environment. You might ask teachers to name one word that describes how they are arriving, or what would make the session feel worthwhile. You might invite a quick pair-share or a show of hands to gauge experience levels. What matters is not the format but the stance: a willingness to respond to what you learn from them.
2. Focus On
The next essential move is deceptively simple: Identify one learning outcome. Just one.
This may feel counterintuitive in a profession where time is scarce and pressures are high. But depth beats breadth. In The PD Book: 7 Habits that Transform Professional Development (Jossey-Bass, 2022), Lori Cohen and I emphasize that if teachers leave a session remembering and applying one idea—one protocol, one routine, one way of analyzing student work—that is far more transformative than being exposed to 20 ideas that never imprint.
Choosing one outcome slows everything down in a productive way. It sharpens the facilitator’s purpose and reduces participants’ cognitive load. It creates spaciousness for processing, questions, and practice. And it allows teachers to walk away with something they can use.
In my work with leaders, I often invite them to fill in this sentence before planning anything else: “By the end of this session, teachers will be able to ___.” If the sentence is long, complex, or filled with conjunctions, it’s a sign the outcome isn’t clear enough.
3. Build Application into the Session
Even when PD lands emotionally and cognitively, it often fails to translate into classroom practice for a simple reason: Teachers leave without having had time to apply what they learned.
The Learning Policy Institute found that PD that includes structured time for practice, planning, and feedback leads to significantly higher implementation of new learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). The science of learning supports this as well: Application consolidates memory, reduces anxiety, and creates the conditions for habit formation.
Application doesn’t require elaborate structures. Teachers might script a five-minute routine to use the next morning, analyze a piece of student work using a new lens, rehearse a conversation protocol with a partner, or plan a short segment of a lesson using the strategy they’ve just learned. Even 10 minutes of intentional application increases the likelihood that new learning will stick.
Honoring Teachers’ Humanity
Teachers deserve PD that honors their humanity and their professionalism. Professional development that values teachers’ expertise, respects their time, and improves instruction begins with a simple discipline: Know your people. When we slow down enough to understand who is in the room, we can design learning that is focused, humane, and grounded in the realities of adult learning. When we choose one outcome and build in time for application, we create the conditions for practice to shift.
