About two years ago, one educator, passionate and knowledgeable about professional learning, invited another like-minded colleague sharing the similar knowledge and passion to read her emerging masterpiece and provide feedback. Andrea and I didn’t know each other at the time, and were connected indirectly by a professional learning legend, Dr. Shirley Hord. I was immediately hooked on...

New calls to “act now” arrive with the beginning of each school year. Acting now involves professional development. Only half of the teachers taking a recent survey “felt most of the professional development they receive led to lasting improvements in their instruction” (TNTP 2015, 26). This leaves teacher educators with the unenviable task of asking teachers who do not...

The gap is not simply an abstract thought that exists only as an idea. It is concrete; it exists in every professional learning activity that does not fulfill teachers’ needs. Surveys identify the reality of professional development: “more than one-half of teachers think professional development is not a good use of their time” (TNTP 2015, 26). This guidebook helps...

Professional learning exists to improve teachers’ effectiveness in helping students learn. Teachers believe learning activities should be relevant and lead to lasting improvement in their instructional practices. Teacher educators spend a tremendous amount of time designing and delivering learning activities that should improve teachers’ effectiveness in helping their students learn....

In reality, the majority of learning activities do not reinforce teachers’ beliefs about professional learning. The failure of existing models to produce learning activities that support teachers’ beliefs creates barriers to professional learning. How do you change the reality of professional development? To make professional development as it is obsolete, you create a process that...

Professional learning environments (PLEs) are concrete representations of an abstract thought. They are “what nobody has thought yet.” Everybody sees the reality of professional development. Yet nobody has thought about using learning activities to create instructional settings that increase teachers’ understanding, skills, or abilities and influence their attitudes and...

Creating conditions in which teacher educators can learn requires an innovative response because of their unique work environment. The essential question for this guidebook becomes: How do you provide conditions that simultaneously meet the learning needs of three distinct groups of learners—teacher educators, participating teachers, and their students?

Teachers are responsible for presenting information in a way that enables students to gain knowledge and the ability to use it in novel situations. Learning knowledge in such a way that it does not transfer to new situations is a waste of students’ and teachers’ time. Creating situations in which students apply knowledge without understanding it creates intellectual confusion that...

Professional learning requires teachers to learn and change. The fear of losing competence leads many teachers to resist learning that requires change. Professional learning initiates resistance when it places teachers into situations that do not provide the time, resources, or individualized learning experiences necessary to produce teacher change and learning. Preparing personal learning plans...

Readers realize making good instructional decisions is an essential skill for every teacher. Poor decisions produce mismatches between an external aspect of alignment (standards) and internal aspects (curriculum and assessments), which adversely affects students’ learning. Adding instructional objectives as an aspect of internal alignment gives teachers a way to measure the instructional...

Professional learning produces lasting change in teachers’ practices when they have strong beliefs in their ability to successfully complete the task and obtain the desired outcome. Anticipating problem areas (teacher efficacy) and developing support plans (resiliency) enable teachers to overcome their fears of the unknown and losing competence. Reinforcing resiliency in areas in which...

Teacher educators want to create professional learning activities that assist participating teachers in increasing students’ understanding. Thus far, the majority of their efforts have not been successful. The Mirage (2015) indicates about half of teachers in the survey believe “the majority of professional development I receive from my school and district does not drive lasting...

Knowledge, skill, and understanding are the heart of teaching. Teachers want students to be able to assess information, apply information in specific situations, and think and act flexibly with what they know. Professional learning provides content, pedagogical, educational, and technological knowledge that would help teachers accomplish what they want for their students. Yet fear of the unknown...

Professional learning creates lasting improvements in teachers’ practices when they express positive emotions toward the learning experience. Enabling teachers to record emotions during implementation and apply self-selected supports results in positive emotions toward the professional learning experience. Replacing previous unsuccessful change efforts with a series of intensely positive...

Clarity, a critical thinking skill, is important, whether creating professional learning for teachers or lesson plans for students. Without clarity teachers could unknowingly twist reality to fit their preexisting conceptions of the degree to which students’ work meets instructional objectives. This example focuses on teachers analyzing observations and students’ learning outputs from...

Developing clarity in understanding instructional results is a prerequisite to effectively revising lesson plans. The ability to test clarity is an important skill because it enables teachers to determine if their understanding of key concepts is free from confusion or ambiguity. Teachers who clearly understand key concepts can develop instruction that specifically addresses students’...

Teachers place a premium on doing what is best for their students. Alignment with teachers’ internal beliefs about professional learning affects their willingness to engage in a learning activity. Creating learning activities that provide evidence of improvement in students’ learning meets teachers’ needs. “Fulfilling Teachers’ Needs” provides readers with an...

Readers know that a teacher’s ability to diagnose a problem correctly and to recommend appropriate solutions is a critical skill. Making accurate inferences is a challenging task because the situations that teachers must interpret are complex. Teachers must interpret students’ learning outcomes and recognize errors or inconsistencies in reasoning that adversely affect learning.

Fulfilling the needs of teachers involves creating a professional learning environment that allows them to convert indeterminate situations to determinate ones. Creating such an environment begins when teachers take situations that are at least in part uncertain, ill defined, complex, and incoherent messes and construct and impose a coherence of their own: design tasks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Is this a warning, a challenge, or both? “Do not go into the future of educational change unless you have a plan to unleash a new form of energy.” It appears that only those with a plan to unleash a new form of energy are welcome in the future of educational change. Therefore, it is a warning to those without a plan as well as a challenge to those with a plan. This guidebook offers...

The foundation for every design task consists of three connections. Connections are research-based entities from three different knowledge bases. Entities from teacher professional development, the cognitive knowledge domain, and a mental processing system identify design task boundaries.

The purpose of Job Aid (2) is to explain how focal points function in the five-step process for creating design tasks. Focal points originate from essential qualities of the formal definitions of content, processing, and classroom connections and identify the main purpose of design tasks. The method for selecting focal points varies according to type of connection.

Job Aid (3) defines instructional goals as general statements about the purpose of the design task. Developing instructional goals allows teacher educators to transform focal points into teacher actions. Instructional goals center tasks on teachers’ use of the content in their classroom ecosystems.

Fulfilling the Needs of Teachers comes complete with access for every text-based resource and free access to the online professional learning environment that corresponds to chapters 1 through 7 in the book.

The purpose of Job Aid (4) is to provide participating teachers with information they need to complete after implementation activities. The Intentional Design Process uses a unique set of teacher resources that make it possible to link professional learning activities to students’ instructional outputs. Examples and explanations focus on guiding teachers through the process of...

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Andrea Ray is a teacher who has taught at the elementary, middle, and high school level. In real life, she has attended twenty-five years of professional development. She knows that if teachers cannot use the information in their classrooms, they consider the learning experience a poor use of their time. Andrea’s goal is to create a design process that produces relevant learning...

The Rowman & Littlefield Professional Learning Environment series of practical guidebooks is written for teacher educators who develop, design, and deliver professional learning. Each guidebook covers a different aspect of creating powerful learning activities for teachers. Every book in the series provides readers access to text-based resources, online resources, and resources for...