for a moment and see if you can identify a few challenges you deal with when designing and delivering PD. Perhaps you don't know how to get everyone to participate. Or you design PD sessions but always run out of time. Or you often have grumbly participants who mutter, “Why do we have to do this?” Or folks engage in PD sessions, but when you visit their classrooms, they aren't incorporating any of what you taught them. What's hard for you about doing PD?
Tips and Tricks: At the outset of a learning experience, ask learners to preview the agenda and identify what they're looking forward to. This allows them to find the portions that might be most relevant to them and therefore to cultivate positive anticipation. In addition, invite learners to share what they're looking forward to with each other. Often, these brief exchanges reveal that participants are looking forward to very different aspects of the agenda, which can help people buy into activities that they might not have been excited about.
As you read the following pages, we encourage you to star or highlight the things you're excited to learn—to cultivate your own positive anticipation.
Seven Chapters, Seven Habits, and More
We hope you're getting excited about what's in this book. In each chapter, we'll dig into one of the habits and provide you explicit instruction on how to practice it. We'll also unpack the beliefs that underlie the habit, and we'll help you see how the larger context you're in might impact how you practice the habits.
In the process of exploring the seven habits, we include stories from our own work, both our successes and our challenges. We've both been designing and delivering PD for many years, and we share our journey with you so that you can see that we, too, have struggled and that we've changed. We hope you'll see yourself in our stories—in our struggles and our growth—and that you'll feel validated and be inspired to continue refining your facilitation skills.
Some features to anticipate:
“Tips and Tricks” ideas that you can do immediately that can have outsized impact. You'll find these in boxes in each chapter.
Mid‐chapter opportunities called “Pause and Process” when the content is dense and we know you'll benefit from a midpoint reflection.
End‐of‐chapter “Pause and Process” prompts to help you reflect on the whole chapter.
A short list of key points to remember also at the end of the chapter.
How to Get the Most from This Book
The seven habits in this book build on each other, so we recommend that you read the chapters sequentially. You'll find that some chapters are heavier on theory and how to apply that theory. While we are committed to telling you how to do transformative PD, we also want you to know something about why what we're suggesting works—and so we'll dip quickly into adult learning theory, the neuroscience of learning, and research on emotional intelligence. We hope you'll note the balance between how we guide you through technical and adaptive habits.
Prior to March 2020, we hadn't done much virtual PD—all of the PD that we did at Bright Morning was in‐person. As a result of the pandemic, we had to design and deliver virtual PD. We learned how to transfer our skills, acquire new ones, and create powerful learning experiences for hundreds of people at the same time on Zoom. We have come to appreciate the potential and opportunities in virtual PD and are excited to share our learnings with you. We hope that even if you don't do virtual PD, you'll find some ideas in these sections that you'll be able to apply.
What makes this book different from many others about PD is our commitment to equity. We are committed to dismantling systems of oppression and the way that they manifest in our culture, organizations, mindsets, and learning spaces. If you've read Elena's other books, you know that whether she's talking about team development, emotional resilience, or instructional coaching, she addresses race, class, and gender. You'll find the same attention to equity in this book: We'll expose how the ideology of white supremacy shows up in a PD session; we'll explore how values around efficiency push us to take on too much and undermine deep learning; and we'll consider the role of dominant culture in allocating authority. We'll show you how you can make decisions when you design and deliver PD that create equitable spaces. If learning about equity is new to you, we're excited to guide you through this first foray. We encourage you to stay open to the emotions that arise in you and to the content.
Finally, we hope you'll have an opportunity to read and discuss this book with others because we know that processing with others helps us learn. Check out the Bright Morning Book Clubs (https://brightmorningteam.com) if you're looking for guidance and other educators with whom to discuss this book.
We wrote this book to shift the PD paradigm. We aspire to guide you to see that your purpose as a PD provider is not simply to “deliver PD,” but to create a community in which people can learn with and from each other. Are you ready for the nitty‐gritty details, the explicit instruction, and the theory that upholds this model of transformative professional development? We're ready to pull back the curtain all the way and share everything we know and do with you so that you can join us at this PD party.
Before You Go
Pause and Process:
How has your definition of professional development changed or expanded based on what you've read so far?
Which Principles of Transformative PD (p. 18) resonate for you?
Write or talk with a few colleagues about their positive learning experiences. What made those experiences good? What do they say makes for a transformative PD session?
Return to your own transformative learning experience that you recalled at the beginning of the chapter. How has your understanding of that experience expanded or deepened based on what you've read in this chapter?
In what ways do you imagine PD could be like a wonderful dinner party?
Remember:
Transformative professional development is a process in which learners are actively engaged. The aim is to explore and expand behaviors, beliefs, and ways of being.
Transformative PD changes practice.
PD can change the world.
PD can feel energizing, joyful, connecting, and even celebratory.
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