1. Identify the Core Need
The foundation of a successful, well-informed professional development plan is understanding exactly what it’s addressing. Start by asking yourself: “What do I want to become better at, and why?” First, gather evidence to help you answer this question honestly and holistically.
Sources of evidence can range from assessment results and classroom observations to student work and parent feedback. Whether you self-reflect or use curriculum or new technology to gather evidence, use multiple forms of evidence—including student, educator, classroom, and school-level data—to identify professional-learning needs (Learning Forward, 2026).
2. Choose One to Two Meaningful Goals
Your PD isn’t a professional bucket list, per se. Rather, it is a collection of relevant, contextualized learning goals that link educator and student outcomes.
Instead of saying you’ll complete a certain number of conferences, courses, or books, think of it as simple cause and effect. A great template to use is: “By the end of the school year, I will improve X so that Y happens for my students.”
3. Connect Your Goal to Student Learning
The PD does not, and should not, stop at “What will I learn?” It should ask, “What about my educational practice will change?”
This can be translated into four core pillars of information to have in your PD plan and what content to enter (Learning Forward, 2026):
- My learning goal: how you’ll improve the formative assessment/lesson
- The change in my practice: A frequency of assessment (example: exit tickets 3x a week)
- Evidence of implementation: samples from lessons and assessments
- Evidence of student impact: student response data
These pillars illuminate the difference it’ll make for your students. If your answers align with the goals you’ve already set, then you’re on the right track! But if they don’t, there’s room to investigate what about your practice needs more attention, and in turn, change.
4. Make the Goal Specific Enough to Measure
We’ve all heard of SMART goals before. What’s most important for a PD is finding the right observations within your goals that you can effectively evaluate.
Here’s a useful formula: I will [professional practice] by [time] in order to [student/school outcome], measured by [evidence].
Over time, you’ll gather a checklist of behaviors, assessments, and successes from your students that provide vital feedback. For instance, if your goal is to incorporate student discussion into a handful of lessons to boost their academic discourse, you’ll utilize observation notes and student reflections to gather measurable evidence.
Having measurable data to evaluate builds evidence, but more importantly, gives you real context and insight into whether your professional learning is actually changing your practice (Learning Forward, 2026).
5. Choose Professional Learning That Actually Changes Practice
A PD plan should not consist exclusively of webinars, conferences, reading articles, and one-off workshops (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Germuth, 2018). Those have their time and space, and possess an importance that’s entirely separate from the learning modes that can take your PD to the next level.
Some learning modes you can combine include:
- Coaching
- Peer observation
- Collaborative planning
- Professional reading
- Lesson study
- Action research
- Mentoring
- Instructional rounds
- Professional learning community (PLC)
- Classroom experimentation
- Reflection
Exposure to information does not mean students, or educators, are maximizing their learning. It’s important to remember not to confuse a PD with professional learning. Integrating active learning, collaboration, modeling, coaching, feedback, and sustained duration into your teaching practice creates the conditions for professional learning to move beyond exposure to information and toward meaningful changes in practice (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017).
6. Build a Learning Cycle Into the Year
As the school year approaches, assign an element of your PD to different times within the school year to stay on track, organized, and focused. A visual representation of this cycle looks like:
Identify → Learn → Apply → Gather Evidence → Reflect → Adjust → Repeat
In September, when school starts, you identify needs and establish baseline expectations. Then as you move into October, learning and research take center stage. That sets you up in November and December to implement the learning and research you gathered in October.
At the start of the second half of the school year, January is the perfect time to gather feedback (from students, mentors, and school leaders). February and March are dedicated to adjusting your practice to the feedback you receive. By April, you’re evaluating the impact of both the feedback and your adjustments. This brings you to the end of the year in May (or June, depending on where you teach), when you reflect and determine the goal(s) for the following school year.
7. Find a Person, Not Just a Resource
Educators benefit from building intentional community, especially when some of that community has experience in the same or similar field (Germuth, 2018). Having a reliable network to talk, learn, and receive feedback from builds confidence and inspiration that can influence how you go about your PD (Germuth, 2018; Learning Forward, 2026).
You may identify with someone like a colleague, department head, or instructional leader in your direct vicinity. There are also coaches, external experts, and professional learning communities full of fellow educators who, despite their individual goals, have the same desire: to give the classroom the very best it deserves.
8. Schedule the Learning—Don’t Leave It to Good Intentions
Translating your PD into scheduled learning requires active planning. This is designed to help you shift from “I want to create a good PD” to “I want a PD I can differentiate to optimally achieve my goal”. The purpose of differentiation here is to identify and match the unique needs, experience levels, and goals of all the students in your classroom.
The PD should include goals, actions, timeline(s), support person(s) if any, resources, evidence, check-in dates, and criteria for success (Learning Forward, 2026). This might look like:
- ● September: Identify one differentiation challenge and collect baseline evidence.
- ● October: Research two approaches, followed up with reading supporting articles or studies.
- November: Observe a colleague.
- December: Implement one strategy, which can be one you previously researched.
- January: Receive peer/coach feedback, whether they observe your classroom or you provide a deliverable like an exit ticket, assessment, or project rubric.
- February: Pair the feedback you received in January with notes from your November evaluation, and devise one way to adjust your strategy.
- March: Examine student work through said adjusted strategy. What do you notice differently? How has your approach changed?
- April: Evaluate the impact. This can be from student reflections, another colleague, or comparison of student successes over the course of the year.
- May: As the year winds down, determine the next steps for your PD.
What about it can stay, what deserves extra attention, and what can you overhaul.
9. Build in Evidence of Impact
Ask three levels of questions to effectively measure the impact of your PD:
- Did I learn? What new knowledge or skills did I develop?
- Did my practice change? What am I doing differently?
- Did it make a difference? What evidence suggests students benefited? (Learning Forward, 2026)
10. For School Leaders: Help Make Plans Connect to School Priorities
For school leaders, it’s crucial to oversee all individual educators’ PDs. That’s why a school-wide PD plan is crucial in bridging the gap between individual classrooms and their collective effort to support a school’s mission and educational objectives (Learning Forward, 2026).
This means planning how to assess the evidence that supports or discredits a specific PD’s impact, which is crucial for measuring the school’s overall success. A school-wide PD plan should connect:
School improvement priority → teacher learning need → professional learning → classroom implementation → student outcome
For example, if the school’s priority is to improve literacy outcomes, then the teacher needs to strengthen their formative literacy assessments. That may look like required assessment training for all teachers, collaborative planning sessions, and even coaching. After these learning experiences, you have helped establish a common formative assessment practice. In turn, you can encourage all educators to build their evidence based on student work, assessment data, and observations (whether they are of one another and/or you observing them).
Conclusion
PD’s are the vehicle that carries an educator’s tenor. They help minimize ambiguity in lesson planning, build educator confidence, and provide a multidisciplinary toolkit to keep classroom practices on task.
When it’s time to redo or reassess your current PD, look into it as a multifaceted entity rather than a one-dimensional plan for the school year. Create space, time, and reflection within your PD to not only teach valuable lessons, but instill them with compassion, context, and purpose.
References
Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective Teacher Professional Development. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute.
Germuth, Amy. (2018). Professional Development that Changes Teaching and Improves Learning. Journal of Interdisciplinary Teacher Leadership, 1. 77-90. 10.46767/kfp.2016-0025.
Implementation Standard | Standards for Professional Learning. (2026). Learning Forward: The Professional Learning Association.
https://standards.learningforward.org/standards-for-professional-learning/transformational-proce sses/implementation/
Salmerón Aroca, J. A., Moreno Abellán, P., & Martínez de Miguel López, S. (2022). Teachers’ Professional Development and Intelligent Ways of Coping with It: A Systematic Review in Elementary and Middle School Education. Journal of Intelligence, 11(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence11010001