The 4 keys to a GREAT PD day for educators (2024)
As a principal or superintendent you have to wear many hats. Arguably, too many. One of the most difficult responsibilities you have is to make your staff better every year… and usually, you’re only given 4 days of professional development to do that. So, what should you do with those 4 days?
The key to a successful PD starts by asking yourself these 4 questions:
What PD do my staff actually need?
What does a successful PD day look like?
What are my schools goals/objectives for the year?
How do I know if a speaker is right for my school?
Let’s dive into these topics a bit more.
1. What do my staff actually need?
The very first question you need to ask before planning any professional development day is this: What do my staff truly need?
The education landscape changes pretty significantly every year, to the point where what we talked about 5 years ago almost seems irrelevant or mundane today. This means it’s becoming increasingly difficult to predict what your staffs’ needs are today. Is it mental health? Is it technology adoption? Is it simply needing more time?
As a PD speaker, the very first question I ask principals and superintendents who are bringing me in is this: “What are your staff struggling with right now?” And if they can’t tell me right away, or give me a wishy-washy answer, I give them homework: Find out with 100% certainty what your staff need, then we can start planning. Because how can we have professional development without knowing what their professional needs are? There’s nothing to develop!
When most schools only get 4 free PD days per year, it’s incredibly important that we be intentional and make sure the teachers are getting real tangible value from being there.
Here are some of the best ways I’ve seen principals check in with their staff to make sure they know what needs should be addressed:
Send a quick email survey to your staff asking what their struggling with (bonus points if the email is titled “What’s your problem?”)
Hold informal 1-on-1’s to check-in
Have open office hours with dedicated time to acknowledge & address issues
Have each grade collaborate to come up with their top 3 struggles & submitting them
Note: These do not have to be strictly in-classroom issues. Things like not having enough time, or struggling with work/life balance are absolutely issues that can be discussed in some way during PD. No problem is too small, especially if many people struggle with it.
2. What does a successful PD day look like?
This is right up there with bullet point #1 for the most important factor as to whether your PD days are good. You absolutely must define what a successful day of professional development means to you. Without clear direction it’s nearly impossible to reach your desired destination. Let’s start by developing the groundwork.
Tips for getting clear on your PD goals
1. Ask yourself what defines “success” for your school.
2. How do you want your staff to feel at the end of the day?
3. What types of tools can help solve my staffs issues?
4. Know what’s worked (and what hasn’t worked) in the past.
Ask yourself what defines “success” for your school.
I have been to hundreds of professional development days - both as a teacher and as a speaker. And no matter what side I’m on, I can always tell when the day was put together with little planning or was just a miss. Success is going to look different for each school and district, so getting extremely clear on what you want your takeaways to be is going to be very helpful.
As I said, this will differ from school to school. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of different versions of this, but here are some goals for professional development days that are a bit more universal, to help you get started.
Every teacher leaves with 1 new thing to take back to their classroom.
Improve teacher mental health to increase retention.
Discover 1 new technology that students can use in every classroom.
Once you are clear on what your goals are and what success means to you, it’ll be much easier to plan the day.
How do you want your staff to feel at the end of the day?
This is a great place to start if you’re struggling to come up with your objectives. Knowing how you want your staff to feel can help uncover your deeper goals & intentions for professional development in the first place.
Say, for example, that you want your teachers to feel calmer at the end of the day, with a sense of optimism going forward. Great! Now we can start to work backwards from here. If we know this, then maybe a teacher mental health professional (such as Charle Peck) would be a good fit. Selecting your speaker is a skill all its own (which is why I cover it later in this article) but once you do have your speaker selected, you can share this goal with them, and they will have suggestions on how you can work together to achieve that feeling.
What types of tools can help solve my staff’s issues?
This goes back to where we started, which is knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt what your staff are struggling with. Much like the last point, once we know this we can begin to reverse engineer a solution.
If we know (for example) that your staff’s number one issue is time, then we can spend an entire day looking at time-saving tools. There are plenty of them out there, and even if your school is already using them, perhaps there’s ways to use them even more efficiently.
Want to talk more about this? Put yourself on my calendar for a free consultation here.
Know what’s worked (and what hasn’t worked) in the past.
A lot of people can tell me their best days of professional development. When they were in flow all day, didn’t know where the time went, and were shocked when the day was over. Some people will go home and continue to look into what they had been learning that day. Or they’ll spend all night playing with the new app they learned about. This is always our goal when it comes to PD!
Additionally, most people can quickly tell you their worst days of professional development. The day went on forever. They were bored to tears, and had to fight falling asleep all day. The speakers were unengaging, and were talking about things teachers couldn’t care less about. When I was in the classroom I know for me if the person leading the PD was low-energy, you had lost me by minute one.
What we want to do is take this a step further, and ask ourselves “why did that suck so much?” or “why did I enjoy that day so much?” Once we begin to dissect those questions, it starts to uncover what things we value in professional development. And it’s not always obvious! Sometimes (like for myself) it really is as simple as the person’s energy and passion. A rule of thumb I tell all the speakers in our bureau is: If you don’t care, they don’t care! You can’t possibly engage an audience on something you aren’t interested in - and the audience knows it.
Biologist and stress expert Dr. Rebecca Heiss speaking at the Ignite Conference, hosted by the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce.
3. What are your schools goals/objectives?
The more clear, the better.
This ties into a lot of things we’ve already talked about, but it’s both more broad and more specific… somehow. Broad because we want to examine what your big picture goals are for your school or district for the coming years. This usually stems from a perceived problem, and we’re looking to find some solutions. We then get specific with it by pinpointing how we want to go about solving that issue.
For example, if your identified problem is poor student engagement, we could spend an entire day examining tools that are specifically designed to improve student engagement. Or, if the problem is too many teachers are quitting, we could start looking at ways to make teachers lives easier, to improve retention.
Something that’s been a really great change since starting our bureau has been my ability to solve problems that are outside of my area of expertise. Now, instead of being the “technology guy” (which I love being, don’t get me wrong) I can focus more on helping educators clearly identify their problems, and then find the right speaker(s) to solve those problems. Which leads me to my last point.
“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”
4. How do I know if a speaker is right for my school?
This is where everything we’ve talked about comes together, and can make or break your PD day.
Some people might not be happy that I’m saying this, but it’s the truth: Not every speaker is right for every job. As much as I’ve had some really awesome professional development days, I’ve also been the one who was not the right fit at that time. This doesn’t mean someone is a bad speaker, just that they were the wrong choice for that school on that day. Since I’ve opened this bureau, my sole job when having a consultation call with a principal (or superintendent, event coordinator, whoever) is to find the perfect person for that day. I try to really dig deep into their ‘why’ and understand their objectives, to make sure they’re getting the most out of their PD every time.
In doing these calls, I’ve identified what seem to be 4 key questions to hiring the right speaker for your schools professional development:
Do they understand what my staff are going through? And can they help?
How will their expertise advance my schools goals?
Do I already know them, or do I know someone who has worked with them?
What have their past clients said?
Do I trust them?
These questions will help you determine exactly who you should hire for your upcoming PD days. When it comes down to it, the most important thing to know is that your speaker is providing value. Use these questions as a guideline to help you get more out of your professional development next year!
Diagram depicting a few content topics for PD days from a handful of our speakers most popular requests.
Conclusion
Planning the perfect PD day for your staff won’t be easy… but it will be rewarding! The first step is to truly listen to your staff. Knowing precisely what problems your teachers are experiencing will point you in the right direction. From there you must define exactly what a successful professional development day looks & feels like. We have some questions in section 2 to help get you started. Next you’ll want to zoom out and assess your school/district’s overall objectives for the year, and use that as a guidepost to ensure you’re going in the right direction. Lastly, you’ll use this information you’ve gathered to help select the right speaker for you. There are many things that you need to take into consideration, and many different routes you could go. If you’d like to see a range of what different types of speakers are out there you can start by looking at our speakers page.
We didn’t get into education for the money… we all know that! But we love this industry because it has the potential to affect positive change in peoples lives in ways that no other profession on earth does. Not a day goes by that I take that for granted. And when it comes time to plan your next PD day, make sure you are doing your staff, your students, and yourself a service by being intentional about every aspect of the day.
If you’d like some help planning your next PD day, you’re welcome to schedule a free consultation with me.
