How to Lead Effective Professional Development as an Instructional Coach

In today's video, fail-safe professional development, seven strategies to make every PD session you run successful. Hello coaches! Welcome back to another episode of Five Minute Friday from Aduro Learning. My name is Kim and today I'm going to be talking about fail-safe PD. These are seven strategies to help make every professional development session that you run successful. Oftentimes, as coaches, we're asked to run professional development sessions and sometimes it's the first time we've presented in front of our peers. Sometimes it's the first time we've presented ever and I definitely remember that feeling. It was not good. I would have loved to have had tips like this to kind of get me started and make sure I had all the components of a really successful session within my own very first presentation. So these seven tips are not necessarily in the order that you might want to use them in a session and you don't necessarily need to use them all. They're just seven strategies that we try to use all the time when we're offering professional development as our company, Aduro Learning, but also as individual instructional coaches in the schools that we work in. So tip number one is to have a warm-up or a transition activity at the very beginning of your session. Oftentimes, as instructional coaches in schools, we're offering PD at the end of a very busy school day. So even two or three minutes to just give teachers a few moments to settle in and focus on the topic of your session so they can make that transition from whatever they were doing during the school day until what's happening now can be really helpful. Even if it's the beginning of a professional development day where they're just coming in from home, that few minutes of transition time can be really valuable. The second strategy is to share relevant resources that will inspire or provoke conversation with teachers, but to always have a protocol or a structure when you share that resource. Whether it's a video, an article, a piece of student work, have some kind of format for what you want teachers to do when they're looking at that work. Maybe you want to use a critical friends group protocol or a visible thinking routine, but avoid giving teachers a video or an article or a piece of student work and just having them talk about it. Giving a framework or a protocol or a structure helps people understand what they're supposed to do in that kind of free time of reviewing that resource. Our third strategy is try to make that session hands-on or practical. Something for teachers to actually do and a practical takeaway for the next day of teaching. So maybe your PD session is on a Wednesday afternoon. Is there something they can do in their classrooms on Thursday or is there something they can do in that session with you that is active and hands-on so that you're modeling what you're talking about. If you're asking teachers to differentiate, try to differentiate that activity so that teachers are seeing in practice exactly what you're asking them to do. Our fourth tip is movement, especially if you have a longer session like a day-long session or multiple day sessions. We know that teachers and everyone really are creatures of habit, so we will come back to that same table, that same seat every single session unless we're kind of asked or there is some structure for us to move around. So even if we're just getting people up and talking at one point during a 45-minute session so they talk to someone different than the person they sat next to, that helps kind of push them a little bit outside of their comfort zone and not get too stagnant in the particular seat they might have chosen. But don't have people move around so much that it's a burden and people get annoyed at you, which can definitely happen. Strategy number five is to have an agenda, an agenda in advance that is visible to everyone with the resources that you're going to use in that session linked on the agenda. I know personally as a type A type person, it drives me crazy to go to a meeting where I don't know what's going to be happening, and a lot of times in schools this is exactly what happens. So you can be a great role model for just basic organization by having an agenda in advance with all the resources that teachers might want to look at after your session linked right in there so they can find them easily. Our sixth strategy is to evaluate the expertise in the room. It's really important to remember that even if you are the instructional coach and you're that passionate advocate for your content area that everyone in the room has something to offer, potentially there are people in that room with you that know more than you about a certain area or subject. So give teachers that opportunity to share with each other and share their expertise and make it clear that you know there's lots going on in that room because there is. And the last seventh tip is to have some kind of wrap-up or conclusion, some way to kind of close out the session the same way that you had a warm-up at the beginning. Maybe some key takeaways or some action plans, something teachers write down on a post-it note and hand to you or write down on a post-it note and keep for themselves or a goal that they set, something to help them take whatever was offered during that professional development session and make it actionable for them so they can do something with it in the future. All right, those were our seven strategies for fail-safe PD to make every professional development session successful. We had a warm-up or a transition, always having a protocol or structure when reviewing any kind of content, having a hands-on or practical session with something that teachers actually do, having some kind of movement in the session so teachers don't sit and git the whole time, having an agenda with resources linked, valuing the expertise in the room, and having some kind of wrap-up or conclusion. Hopefully, one of those strategies is helpful for you that you can bring to the next professional development session that you offer. Thank you so much for watching today. If you enjoyed any part of this video, please give it a thumbs up. It really helps us know what we should focus on. If you want to see more great coaching tips and strategies in under five minutes, subscribe to our YouTube channel and click the notifications bell to find out every time we release a new episode. If you're looking for even more coaching resources, head over to aduralearning.com slash coachbetter to explore over 20 online courses designed by coaches for coaches. And catch us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Adurale Learning to connect with us. See you next week for Five Minute Friday.