I love Teacher Professional Learning. Let me rephrase that, I love Well-Designed and Meaningful Teacher Professional Learning. I like being a part of it and I really love designing and leading it. It is an opportunity to grow and stretch my thinking, it is an opportunity to share that thinking with others, and to help build the skills of our teaching teams.

Unfortunately, there are many who may not share this sentiment because they have been the recipients of poorly designed professional learning where the greatest amount of thinking that occurs is where to go for lunch. Professional learning needs to be just as engaging for our teachers as we want their lessons to be for their students. In fact, it is a perfect place to model some of the practices we hope to see!

One of the common complaints that can be heard during teacher professional learning is something to the effect of ‘we did this before, it just has a new name.’ Compounding this, is when the presenter says something like, ‘now, many of you have already been doing this.’ They are probably saying this as a way to breed familiarity and gain buy-in on the idea, but I feel that what happens is actually that it causes people to tune out since they are unlikely to learn the new information if it's what they are already doing.

While it is largely true that many of our ‘new’ ideas look like a recycling of something that has come up before, it often misses the nuance of what is happening. On the surface level, something like Universal Design for Learning looks very much like Differentiated Instruction. However, the difference lies in that UDL is a more upstream and proactive approach, whereas DI tends to be more responsive in nature. This nuance is enough to make a difference in that the approach would change and the implementation would be different. I firmly believe that many of these initiatives fail because these nuances are not recognized and adjusted for.

John Hattie shows that pretty much anything that teachers try will meet with a measure of success. As such, a lot of these ideas are good in theory, but the difficulty happens when we try to implement them. Implementation is the make or break point of any initiative, it is why ideation of any idea should be considering implementation as a parallel process. If you have a great idea but can’t explain it well or support it, then it is going to fail.

To this end, implementation requires consideration of a few different points:

1. Clarity: How clear is the message? Also, how many interpretations has it gone through? If you want to implement a program and explain it to someone who has to pass it along to someone else, etc, the message will get diluted with each stop along the way. To be fair, most are trying to pass it along faithfully, but they will understand it a little differently and pass on a new version to the next person. Picture the game Telephone where you whisper a phrase and it goes around the room until it makes its way back to the origin. Chances are it doesn’t sound quite like the original message.
   
   

2. Planning: This seems obvious in that you need some way to implement your idea. The problem is, the plan can be a little vague many times without knowing how your initiative will work once the rubber hits the road. Implementation that lacks the nuts and bolts details to help make it succeed will fail. There are fears that something that is too prescriptive does not allow for the variation across schools and classrooms, but this is why you need a solid core that can be adapted and modified to fit, rather than have others try and do this themselves. A strong partnership across all levels to see how it interacts is vital to the success of it.
   
   

3. Support: What supports have you put in place to help make this happen? I have made the mistake of saying ‘tell me what you need’ only all too often. With something new, they may not know what they need so this is not as helpful as you might think. Scaffolding the supports so that they are as open ended will help since it gives options as to what is available such as time, physical resources, certain software, etc. Again, working together so there is a constant discussion and assessment of next steps at all levels are key to knowing what supports are needed.
   
   

4. Buy-In: The final piece of the puzzle is to achieve buy in so that participants want to make the initiative work. If the first three components are in place but there is no buy-in then it will fail. Whenever you are adding something to the plate, consider what you can take off. Try to aim for equitable trades, adding something large but taking something inconsequential is a token gesture rather than an attempt to balance the change in workload. Understand that many educators already have full plates and adding ‘one small thing’ may be more than you realize, especially if you are not the person who will be doing the work. Additionally, how many others are adding ‘one small thing’ to the same plate? Find ways to show the benefits and the successes, but also share in the workload in a meaningful way.

Ensuring that all four of these pieces are in place can be hard to achieve. Also be mindful that with each ‘failed’ implementation, it makes it that much harder to convince educators to buy into the next since it reinforces the ‘we tried that before’ mentality. Rebranding ideas can be helpful at times rather than trying to directly resurrect one that failed, but most educators will notice this as well and classify those as the same idea. When this happens, a suggestion would be an ‘autopsy’ of why previous iterations failed, address them, and communicate how these factors have been addressed in moving forward.

Ultimately, all partners in implementation need to work together in a meaningful way where everyone rolls up their sleeves to do the work equally. This means that those with the ideas, need to meaningfully engage in those who will be putting those ideas into practice.