More Human Professional Development
Leadership+Design was founded with a strong belief that there were human centered alternatives to our own professional learning experiences. And we set off to design them. Whether we were hosting our own off-site programs for school leaders or working with a school community, we knew from our own experiences that “PD” often felt more like a box to check than an authentic opportunity to grow as learners and professionals. The experiences we participated in often lacked a focus on the humans who would be ultimately receiving the experience
Most inservice days we attended were workshops created for the “average” employee at a school, and as Todd Rose wrote in his book The End of Average, “When you design for the average, you design for no one.” Sometimes those inservice topics were relevant to most staff in the room but rarely, if ever, were they differentiated. As we sat in the cafeteria or auditorium, very little intentionality was placed on our seating arrangements, how we interacted with our colleagues, or whether the learning felt relevant to our practice. When it came to most topics, including Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or Differentiated Learning Practices, or Assessment Models, our own colleagues in the room had an enormous range of understanding and experiences with the topic, but that was rarely accounted for. Most notably, we were rarely held accountable for the content we learned that day. The experience often stopped at the end of the day and was rarely revisited or built on.
Open enrollment programs and conferences were a little better. We went because we were interested in a topic of the program (although often sprinkled among the participants were those who had been “voluntold” by their supervisors to attend). These programs tended to offer professional learning modeled after the academic classroom. Somebody with expertise delivered the material and we took notes. Hotel conference rooms with rows of chairs served as our ‘classrooms” and we watched a lot of mediocre power points presentations filled with lots of text in 18 point font. Some of the best moments of these experiences were the interstitial moments at breaks.
We knew we wanted to create professional learning experiences that could be the opposite of the static, content heavy, predictable, one size fits all programs we were experiencing. We wanted to design more human experiences that had a lasting impact - that were transformational.
We want all of you to be able to design those learning experiences for your professional community as well as curate your own learning. To that end, here are six qualities to consider as you build out professional learning days and years and choose learning experiences for yourself that will ultimately help you to grow and evolve in your work and build a culture of learners in your school.
Highly experiential: Ryan Burke always reminds me that we need to stop trying to think our way into new ways of acting and rather to act our way into new ways of thinking. In all of my years of receiving and designing learning experiences I know that sitting and listening does not lead to changed practice. We need to DO something, embody the learning, before it becomes something we can fully adopt a new practice. Building new habits, skill sets and mindsets means activating and strengthening muscles we didn’t have before. If we are sitting in a seat and hearing about these new habits, mindsets and skill sets, it’s the equivalent of a competitive runner hearing about how to run faster. Make it real. Make it experiential.
Uncomfortable: Learning anything requires admitting we don’t know very much in the first place. That can be uncomfortable when we approach a new subject as a knower and not a learner. But real learning usually requires a degree of incompetence as we progress towards mastery. If the best learning is experiential, it means that the first time we try something we might be pretty bad at it. That’s uncomfortable for most people. Discomfort is usually a sign that growth is happening. Martin Linsky and Ron Heifetz talk about one role of leaders as being the ability hold others in a “productive range of distress.” This is also known as the “groan zone.” We sometimes thing that comfort is a condition for learning, but most signs point to productive discomfort as the optimal climate for growth.
Fun: Can something be both uncomfortable and fun? Absolutely.These two conditions can exist simultaneously or at different moments in a professional learning experience. The two types of fun - Type 1 Fun and Type 2 Fun - are experienced differently. Type 1 fun feels playful and enjoyable in the moment. Type 2 fun may feel like work in the moment but is experienced as fun in retrospect - mostly because the experience was rewarding in the long run. Building in both types of fun in an experience ensures that people leave feeling both joyful about the experience AND fulfilled that the experience allowed them to grow in new ways. Related to fun is surprise and delight. We love building in elements of surprise and delight into professional learning. We crave experiences that are out of the ordinary and that delight us because they are unfamiliar and open our minds to new ways of being and doing.
Multi-sensory: When Tara Curry-Jahn suggested we start off a PD experience for our L+D Fellows by eating chocolate covered bugs together, we couldn’t have been more excited! Not only was this moment experiential, uncomfortable, surprising and fun, but it was also multi-sensory. A deeply human professional learning experience should consider all senses - taste, sound, sight, smells and touch. There is a reason why our sense of smell can take us back to a moment in time or a specific sound or a song provokes a visceral reaction in us. A single image on a slide might provoke more learning than a slide with 50 words in 18 point font. Basic brain science points to multisensory experiences as more lasting and profound. What are you or your
Relational: At the heart of learning is building connections with new ideas, but also with other people. If a learning experience is designed solely for filling an individual's mind with new information and ideas, it is a lost moment to build human connection. We learn best when we are sharing our learning with others and forming connections. The best professional learning attends both to skill development and human development. An-all school professional development experience should help the humans know each other better and offer intentionally designed moments for conversation and exploration.
Repeated and Sustained: If you are going to invest in professional learning for yourself or for your school, the one-shot approach is likely going to stick like eggs to teflon. Not at all. One of our favorite models for school wide PD comes from the Duke School. Former Head of School, Dave Michelman, focused on one PD topic for three years at a time. If he was going to invest the money in helping his professional community to build capacity in something, he knew he needed to go deep. To transform practice, culture, or a community mindset, the learning needs to sustain over time and each experience should build on the next. Being able to learn something new, practice it, reflect on it and build learning over time, is the most effective way to transform practice, develop mastery and to see real sustained change. Nobody learns anything by doing it once.
As we begin to go back to more in-person professional learning experiences - in service days and conferences - We encourage you seek out and build experiences that are built for transformation and for leveraging the humanity of the learners in the room. Of course we’ve also learned in this past two years that professional learning can happen anywhere, and online professional learning can be just as human as being in person if it has these same qualities.
