There is a question I keep coming back to when I think about professional development:
Did we actually teach the teacher, or did we simply tell them?
One of my favorite reminders from Jennifer Moore, the principal at Global Citizens Public Charter School where I worked for a couple of years, was some version of this idea:
Just because we planned a lesson and gave it does not mean we taught. If what we were trying to teach was not learned, then the teaching did not occur.
I have never forgotten that.
Because I think we confuse our intentions with reality all the time.
We planned it.
We presented it.
We emailed it.
We put it in the weekly roundup.
We mentioned it in a meeting.
We gave everyone the slide deck.
We trained them in August.
And then months later, when practice does not look the way we expected, the frustration becomes:
We already taught them this. Why aren’t they doing it?
But did we teach it?
Or did we expose people to information and assume the rest would somehow happen on its own?
What August actually asks teachers to hold
Across the school settings where I have worked and consulted, beginning-of-year onboarding has varied in the details, but the density has been remarkably familiar.
There are required trainings around safety, mandated reporting, allergies, health procedures, CPR, legal requirements, and compliance.
There are school policies everyone needs to know and supposedly enforce consistently.
Attendance.
Tardiness.
Uniforms.
Bathrooms.
Phones.
Technology.
Family communication.
Behavior.
Emergency procedures.
There may be curriculum training, classroom-management expectations, mission and vision work, assessment systems, grading expectations, or new schoolwide initiatives.
Then there are all the meetings that are not technically professional development but still live inside the same narrow window.
Grade-level meetings.
Departments.
Vertical alignment.
Horizontal alignment.
Co-teacher planning.
IEPs and 504s.
Student-support conversations.
Curriculum planning.
Technology setup.
And in between all of that, teachers are trying to make an actual classroom functional.
Where do backpacks go?
Where do students turn in work?
What has to be posted in the LMS?
Who needs a welcome email or phone call?
What are the first-week plans?
Where are devices stored?
How do I make copies?
Who approves purchases?
Who do I ask when something goes wrong?
What happens at dismissal?
How quickly am I expected to respond to families?
Different environments require very different kinds of preparation too. A Montessori classroom has different physical and material demands than a high school classroom. A play-based early childhood environment needs something different from an AP Spanish class.
Some things genuinely must be ready before students arrive.
Some things can be built with students.
Some things are functional.
Some are aesthetic.
Some are traditions we continue because that is simply how it has always been done.
And all of this is happening while people are supposedly absorbing, understanding, retaining, and preparing to implement new professional learning.
That matters.
Learning requires mental capacity, and working memory is limited. The more competing demands a learner is holding, the harder it becomes to process new information deeply enough to use it later.
That does not mean teachers cannot learn difficult things.
It means the design of the learning matters.
Not everything we call “training” requires the same kind of learning
I initially started thinking about beginning-of-year work in four rough categories.
Know it.
Information I need to know or know how to find.
Coordinate it.
Things adults need to align around together.
Build it.
Concrete systems, environments, materials, schedules, or resources that need to exist.
Learn to do it.
Practices that require actual skill development.
That distinction helps.
But even those categories get messy very quickly.
Coordination is itself a skill.
Working with people who have different personalities, levels of experience, communication styles, training, confidence, and authority is not automatic.
Neither is handing off responsibility.
Neither is deciding when to lead and when to support.
Neither is working through disagreement.
Neither is responding professionally when something becomes emotionally charged.
So implementation is not simply about whether one person understood the training.
It is also about whether people can actually use that understanding together.
“Everyone is responsible” is not a protocol
I once worked on a schoolwide event where a team was collectively responsible for planning and carrying out the work.
There was no formally designated lead.
No clear decision-making structure.
No protected planning time.
No clearly established budget.
And no shared understanding of exactly what the final product was supposed to be.
People started working within smaller groups because something had to move forward.
Later, expectations became clearer mostly through revisions and rejected plans.
One person eventually became the de facto coordinator because the work required someone to hold it together.
Then that person was absent on the day of the event.
Another staff member had to step into a role they had not been prepared for and make decisions quickly while interpreting multiple previous communications.
The event happened.
From the outside, it probably looked fine.
Internally, though, it created confusion, wasted labor, resentment, and conflict.
Looking back, what stands out to me is not simply that individuals made mistakes.
The system had never clearly answered basic questions:
Who owns this?
Who decides?
Who communicates?
Who handles disagreement?
What happens if the person leading is absent?
What resources are available?
What is the timeline?
What does success actually look like?
When we say everyone is responsible, we may mean that everyone shares responsibility for the outcome.
But that is not the same thing as knowing:
Who owns the decision right now?
And that distinction matters in classrooms, teams, school events, student crises, restorative conversations, curriculum implementation, and almost every other situation that requires adults to act together.
Information delivered is not the same as learning achieved
Research on teacher professional development reinforces this distinction.
A Learning Policy Institute review of 35 rigorous studies identified seven features that appeared repeatedly in effective professional development: content focus, active learning, collaboration, modeling, coaching or expert support, feedback and reflection, and sustained duration.
That list is important partly because of what is missing:
We told them once in August.
Effective professional learning is not defined by whether a session happened.
It is defined by whether learning eventually changes practice.
One experience that felt different
One of the clearest examples I have experienced of professional learning designed around actual learning has been in a course with Dr. Frida Rundell.
We would first learn the theory behind a particular practice.
There was time to ask questions and make sense of it.
Then we practiced applying the skill in front of one another.
The person practicing received feedback specific to what they were doing, but everyone watching was learning too.
We saw how the same principle could look slightly different depending on the practitioner, the situation, and the feedback.
And then we did not immediately move on.
We had the next week to practice that same skill in our own work while continuing to read and think about it.
Only after we had tried it, struggled with it, reflected on it, and developed some familiarity with it did we begin the next skill, which built on the previous one.
That pacing changed the experience.
The learning was not treated as something that had happened simply because the information had been delivered.
The implementation was part of the learning.
That experience mirrors many of the features found in the professional-development research: active learning, modeling, expert feedback, reflection, and sustained opportunities to practice.
We know people need to come back to learning
Another thing educators already know is that important learning generally needs to be revisited.
Spacing learning across time, rather than concentrating everything into one exposure, is associated with stronger long-term retention. Retrieval practice asks learners to actively bring prior learning back to mind rather than simply hear it again.
Most of that research is about student learning, so I would be careful about pretending it gives us a perfect formula for adult PD.
But the question it raises for professional learning is worth asking:
Why would we design something we consider important enough to change practice as a one-time information event?
And repetition alone is not the answer either.
Sending the same reminder in an email, mentioning it in a meeting, and putting it in a weekly bulletin does not necessarily deepen understanding.
Revisiting learning can instead mean:
trying it,
retrieving it,
applying it differently,
reflecting on what happened,
receiving feedback,
and connecting it to a new situation.
That is very different from simply hearing the same words again.
So what could beginning-of-year professional learning look like instead?
I do not think the solution is pretending schools have unlimited time.
They do not.
Safety requirements still exist.
Students are still coming.
Classrooms still need to function.
Families still need communication.
Teachers still need schedules, systems, technology, and curriculum.
The more useful question is:
What genuinely has to happen now, and what could be intentionally learned across the year?
Before students arrive: minimum viable readiness
Before Day 1, prioritize what people need for the school to be safe, functional, and coherent.
That may include:
mandated safety and reporting requirements
essential emergency procedures
critical student accommodations
schedules and arrival/dismissal systems
basic communication expectations
minimum functional classroom setup
necessary technology access
a small number of high-priority instructional or relational practices
Not everything needs to become mastery before students arrive.
Some things need to be introduced.
Some things need to be searchable.
Some things require practice.
Those are different needs.
If something is primarily reference information, maybe it belongs in a searchable guide rather than a 90-minute meeting.
If someone can complete something asynchronously, perhaps that frees live time for something that actually requires interaction.
If something requires judgment, discussion, rehearsal, collaboration, or feedback, that may be exactly where synchronous time is worth protecting.
The first few weeks: let reality create better questions
Once students arrive, teachers finally have context.
Now the questions become real.
Where are routines breaking down?
Which parts of the curriculum are confusing?
Where are students struggling?
Which expectations looked simple on paper but are difficult in practice?
What support does this particular group of students actually need?
Instead of trying to predict every implementation problem before school begins, some professional learning can intentionally wait until people have experiences to attach it to.
September and October: model, rehearse, observe, adjust
Now return to the highest-priority practices.
Model them.
Rehearse them.
Observe them.
Give feedback.
Let teachers observe one another.
Talk about what is working.
Identify what is getting in the way.
Try again.
This is where professional learning starts to look more like:
knowledge → modeling → supported practice → feedback → reflection → independent implementation → continued support
But even that is not a neat staircase.
People move backward and forward.
Someone may understand a concept but still need another model.
Someone else may implement quickly but struggle with consistency.
A team may discover that what looked like a skill problem is actually a schedule problem.
That discovery is not a failure of the process.
It is part of the process.
Throughout the year: spiral instead of dump
Important learning should return.
Not constantly.
Not because teachers need more meetings.
But intentionally.
Staff meetings can revisit one idea.
A coaching cycle can deepen another.
Peer observation can make something concrete.
A short case discussion can surface problems nobody understood in August.
A targeted workshop can come at the moment people actually need the information.
This is where spacing becomes less about repeating material and more about organizing professional learning so that understanding can deepen over time.
The goal is not more PD.
It is better-timed PD.
Before asking “Why aren’t they doing it?”
If implementation is inconsistent, I want to slow down before deciding what that means.
Did they understand it?
How do we know?
Did they see what it looked like?
Did they practice it?
Did they receive feedback?
Did they try it in context?
Did we revisit it after they had actual experience?
Are the systems around them helping or interfering?
Do people know who owns what?
Do they have the time and tools to do it?
And when something went badly, did anyone have space to understand what happened, make adjustments, and try again?
Those questions do not remove accountability.
They make accountability more accurate.
If something matters enough for us to expect consistent implementation, then it should matter enough for us to design conditions that make consistent implementation more likely.
Fidelity is not obedience
There are real reasons schools need consistency.
Some practices protect student safety.
Some are legally required.
Some are grounded in evidence.
Some preserve program integrity.
Some make sure students are not receiving radically different experiences depending on which classroom they happen to enter.
So I am not arguing that everyone should simply do whatever they prefer.
But if fidelity matters, we need to understand what produces fidelity.
Mandating something does not make it a habit.
Presenting something does not make it understood.
Understanding something does not automatically make it usable.
And using something once does not make it sustainable.
That distinction matters.
Did we teach?
As educators, we spend enormous amounts of time thinking about how students learn.
We think about prior knowledge.
Scaffolding.
Modeling.
Practice.
Feedback.
Reflection.
Retrieval.
Relationships.
Context.
We know learning takes time.
And then adults enter a professional-development room and, far too often, we behave as though none of those things apply anymore.
That is the contradiction I keep coming back to.
If only the people who already had enough background knowledge could use what we taught, did we teach?
If only the people who would have figured it out from the handbook succeeded, did we teach?
If only the teachers with enough experience to fill in the gaps themselves could implement the practice consistently, did we teach?
I do not think professional learning needs to become infinitely longer or infinitely more complicated.
I think it needs to become more intentional.
Less:
Here is everything you need to know.
And more:
Here is what matters now. Let’s understand it. Let’s practice it. Let’s see what happens. Let’s come back together. Let’s adjust. Then let’s build on it.
Because if the learning never makes it into practice, we may have completed the professional development.
But I am not sure we can say we finished the teaching.
Sources & Further Reading
For readers interested in digging further into the research behind professional learning, implementation, cognitive load, practice, and reflection:
Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective Teacher Professional Development. Learning Policy Institute.
A review of 35 rigorous studies of teacher professional development. The authors identify seven recurring features of effective professional learning, including active learning, collaboration, modeling, coaching and expert support, feedback and reflection, and sustained duration.
Education Endowment Foundation. (2021). Effective Professional Development.
Guidance on designing professional development around mechanisms that support changes in practice, including revisiting prior learning, goal setting, feedback, and action planning.
Sweller, J. (1988). “Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning.” Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.
One of the foundational papers in cognitive load theory, examining how the limits of cognitive processing affect learning and the acquisition of new knowledge.
DOI: 10.1016/0364-0213(88)90023-7
Australian Education Research Organisation. Vary Practice: Spacing, Retrieval and Varied Practice.
An accessible research-informed guide to spacing practice over time, retrieval, and varied opportunities to apply learning in ways that support longer-term retention and flexible use.
Institute of Education Sciences. Implementation Planning Resources. U.S. Department of Education.
Resources for thinking beyond initial training to the conditions needed for implementation, including clearly defined roles and responsibilities, timelines, resources, leadership support, communication, ongoing support, and monitoring.
A note on this piece
The research above helps inform the questions and framework explored here. The school experiences, examples, interpretations, and proposed professional-learning sequence come from my own experience as an educator, instructional coach, curriculum leader, consultant, and graduate student working across different educational settings.
