For years, schools have relied on professional development (PD) as the primary lever for improving teaching. PD is often something done to teachers: an event selected, scheduled, and delivered by someone else. It might be a keynote, a workshop, or a required session that checks the “mandated hours” box. PD can be inspiring . . . or it can frustrate already overworked educators. Even engaging PD can be ineffective because, at its core, PD is a noun—an event you attend. It’s “drive-by,” one-off, and limited in its ability to create sustainable change.
Professional learning (PL), however, is something very different. Hannay et al. (2006) define professional learning as “the application of an iterative cycle of inquiry that two teachers engage in daily, within a collaborative and supportive environment, with the intent to change practice.” PL is not an event; it is a behavior. It is ongoing, participatory, and tightly aligned with instructional goals.
Moving from drive-by PD to meaningful, lasting professional learning requires more than rebranding a workshop. It requires intentionally designing learning structures that are collaborative, sustained, and responsive to educator needs. Through our coaching work with schools, we discovered several research-based ways to shift from one-off PD to continuous, job-embedded PL. By designing universally supportive PL experiences, encouraging educator choice, opening classroom practice through learning walks, and using relational structures like coaching to deepen reflection, leaders can truly create a culture of professional learning.
Adult Learning Needs Intentional Design
Teachers deserve the same conditions we expect them to design for students: active learning, meaningful engagement, opportunities to reflect, and experiences that translate directly into practice. The days of “do as I say, not as I do” are over for both students and teachers. We can’t champion inquiry, agency, and inclusion for students while giving teachers the opposite; their learning must reflect what we want for classrooms. As Kendra Grant and Luis Pérez remind us in their book, Dive Into UDL (2018), “If we want students to experience a different type of learning . . . then we as educators need to experience something similar in our own professional learning.”
Adults bring a wide range of backgrounds, needs, and motivations to their learning, yet much of PD ignores what Malcolm Knowles (1984) identified decades ago as the core principles of andragogy: Adults need choice, relevance, collaboration, and opportunities to apply new learning. Educators’ learning must be intentionally designed with their variability and individual needs in mind. This is the bridge from PD to PL. And it’s why Universal Design for Learning (UDL) becomes essential for adults, not just students.
UDL offers a framework to design professional learning that anticipates learner differences and fosters agency, setting the stage for lasting instructional change. Every day in education, we accept that students vary widely in background, readiness, preference, and need. Yet, when we plan learning for adults, we often ignore that same variability. We hand every adult the same format, pacing, and expectations—then wonder why implementation falls flat. The bottom line is that educators are learners, too. If we want high-quality implementation, we should universally design the support just as intentionally as we design the instruction.
Professional learning is not an event; it is a behavior. It is ongoing, participatory, and tightly aligned with instructional goals.
Designing Support for Teacher Variability
Simply acknowledging adult variability isn’t enough. PL must be intentionally structured to honor it. Universally Designed Support offers a practical way to operationalize UDL in professional learning. The idea of Universally Designed Support is deceptively simple, but its impact can be significant: It helps professional learning lead to meaningful changes in practice.
The premise is that if learners vary (which of course they do), then their support structures need to vary as well. Some teachers need to see a strategy modeled with their own students. Some need individual coaching to process, question, and plan. Some want webinars, books, and podcasts to deepen understanding. Some want a PLC to troubleshoot and grow alongside colleagues. Some need bite-sized implementation cycles. Flexibility and responsiveness should be standard practice for adult learning. When we design support that honors teacher variability, we make implementation more likely, burnout less likely, and impact more sustainable.
Embracing Variability to Build Ownership
Once we acknowledge that educators vary in how they learn, the logical next step is empowering them to choose the learning pathways that work best for their roles, goals, and contexts. When educators are trusted to self-select their professional learning, something powerful happens: ownership. Rather than passively receiving information in a required one-size-fits-all session, teachers become active participants in their own growth. They identify what they need, seek it out, and engage more deeply because the learning is personally meaningful and professionally relevant.
This might look like a science teacher selecting a session on inquiry-based learning to promote student engagement or a team of high school teachers attending a session on Paideia Seminars to increase the quality of student discourse in their classrooms. This kind of intentional, teacher-driven learning leads to lasting classroom impact because it honors what educators already know and builds on their existing expertise. It also fosters a culture of professional agency. When teachers feel like their growth is valued and trusted, their sense of efficacy rises and so does their commitment to the work.
Self-selected professional learning doesn’t mean abandoning structure. School leaders can support this shift to teacher-directed learning by scheduling time for teachers to participate in and reflect on optional professional learning opportunities. This might look like offering high-quality options during school-based professional learning or funding teachers to attend workshops and conferences beyond the school and district level when possible. When teachers help shape their learning journeys, professional learning becomes a catalyst for transformation.
Deepening Learning with Collaborative Inquiry
While individual choice is critical, learning also deepens when teachers learn with and from one another. One powerful way to accomplish this is by making teaching “public” through collaborative inquiry structures, a powerful example of how PL happens in practice. When schools make a commitment that instruction is worth studying, they foster a continuous cycle of collective improvement (Saphier & West, 2009) and embed reflection and analysis directly into teachers’ day-to-day work.
Learning walks are a low-stakes method of collaborative inquiry structures where teachers observe student learning and peer instructional moves across classrooms. Their broad, positive purpose is designed to make teaching public and keep host teachers at ease. Learning walks work best when host teachers volunteer and are allowed to select the observation times during which they will be visited. This level of ownership respects educators’ professional autonomy. In learning walk groups, a facilitator leads reflective discussions after teachers visit their colleagues’ classrooms. Discussions focus on students’ learning, encouraging teachers to observe how students engage, access information, and demonstrate learning. Figure 1 (p. 12) shows sample questions facilitators might pose, depending on the focus of the learning walk.
Sustaining Learning Through Relational Structures
Opening classroom doors is only one part of the professional learning equation. Sustaining new learning requires relational structures, such as coaching and professional learning communities (PLCs), that support teachers as they refine and extend their practice. Coaching continues to be one of the most powerful components of professional learning. When coaching is combined with public teaching, the result is peer coaching, a strong pathway to transfer new knowledge from theory to daily practice. Research shows that peer coaching, when added to training components like theory, demonstration, and practice, can lead to impressive gains in knowledge, skill, and most importantly, the transfer of learning to practice (Joyce & Showers, 2002).
Peer coaching can flourish under a structured focus. Teams can prioritize one schoolwide goal, like student engagement, while allowing each teacher to select an additional personalized goal for deeper focus, connecting the group’s work to individual, self-selected learning. Effective teams use clear protocols for observation and instructional feedback tools. These structures ensure observations are non-evaluative and that the final debriefing session facilitates genuine reflective debriefing, prompting teachers to create actionable next steps. For example, when Kenny McKee (coauthor) supported peer coaching in Buncombe County Schools in North Carolina, teachers reflected on how the coaching related to next steps in their practices, saying:
- “I tried a new protocol and had concerns about lag time and staggered finishes. My peers gave great suggestions for tiered responses to differentiate with the groupings. We also discussed ways to deal with ‘dominant’ voices in the classroom to give voice to others.”
- “The learning targets for the lesson were clear! The students were working . . . to reinforce and practice an algorithmic skill. I need to do more debriefing at the end of the lesson or when I switch topics.”
By engaging in focused observation and feedback, peer coaching teams help build coherence around high-quality teaching practices across the school. These structures operationalize professional learning by building shared inquiry into daily practice.
Instructional coaches and educators can also co-create goals—another practice, like peer coaching, that allows educators to collaborate on learning. In this approach, a coach works toward a goal with a teacher, acting as a partner to support the growth of their instructional practice. Co-creation removes the perceived status of the coach as the “expert,” promotes shared ownership of outcomes, and acknowledges the educator’s expertise. Goals are designed around the educator’s actual needs and the specific context of their classroom and students, which ensures the learning is immediately applicable and avoids the common pitfall of compliance-based PD.
Professional learning communities provide ongoing collegial interactions that focus on what students should know and be able to do, and how to measure learning, review data, and develop next steps. The core purpose of professional learning is to positively impact instructional practice and, consequently, student learning. By using data (e.g., assessment results, student work, observation notes), educators can objectively see the impact of their own actions, which provides powerful and personalized feedback that drives change. As professional learning deepens, educators evolve from passive recipients to engaged practitioners and, eventually, to empowered collaborators shaping their own instructional growth.
Why Educator Agency Matters
When teachers participate in these types of professional learning, they gain something of high importance: the agency to drive their own growth. Teacher agency means teachers have voice, choice, and ownership in their learning—and also the processes, tools, and resources to determine the knowledge and skills they need to develop and evaluate how new practices are working in their classrooms. Ultimately, professional learning builds teacher agency by helping teachers make decisions that fit their roles so that they extend similar experiences to their students.
Professional development will always have its place, but sustainable improvement comes from professional learning that is teacher-driven, iterative, reflective, and supported through universally designed structures. When we honor teacher variability and design shared, supportive learning structures, we create the conditions for sustained instructional improvement, and for the kind of teaching all students deserve.
Reflect & Discuss
Where might teachers in your school need different kinds of support (modeling, coaching, PLC time, resources) to move from learning about a strategy to effectively implementing it in their classrooms?
What norms or structures would need to shift for peer observation, or other collaborative learning practices, to feel developmental rather than evaluative in your school or district?
