Promote professional learning plans that focus on real situations and specific needs related to increasing the learning and well-being of all staff and students.

Professional learning becomes relevant when it begins with work educators and students are actually experiencing. The leader’s task is to turn those situations into focused learning questions, select support that fits the cause and context, and create conditions in which people can practice without adding avoidable burden.

1. 1

   Gather real situations from the work

   Invite educators, students, families, coaches, and support staff to identify recurring moments where learning, belonging, workload, communication, or implementation breaks down.

   • Use student work, classroom evidence, service data, listening sessions, team artifacts, and employee experience—not a needs survey alone.
   • Describe the situation without blaming the people experiencing it.
2. 2

   Define a specific learning need

   Narrow a broad concern such as “engagement,” “behavior,” or “staff stress” into a practice educators can learn, apply, and study in a particular context.

   • Identify who needs support, what they must become able to do, and what successful application would look like.
   • Separate required common learning from optional or role-specific pathways.
3. 3

   Distinguish skill needs from system conditions

   Determine whether the difficulty reflects missing knowledge or practice, or whether schedules, caseloads, staffing, policy, tools, trust, or competing priorities are preventing sound practice.

   • Do not prescribe resilience training for a workload or organizational-design problem.
   • Pair professional learning with operational changes when both are necessary.
4. 4

   Set learning and well-being outcomes together

   Define how the plan should improve student learning or experience and how it should support sustainable, effective work for educators.

   • Choose a small set of observable educator-practice, student-experience, and workplace-condition indicators.
   • Check that the plan does not improve one outcome by creating an unreasonable burden elsewhere.
5. 5

   Select an evidence-informed response that fits

   Examine the quality and applicability of the research, the provider’s expertise, the demands placed on participants, and the conditions required for successful implementation.

   • Ask how the approach serves multilingual learners, students with disabilities, varied educator roles, and the community’s cultural context.
   • Define what the provider will deliver, what local leaders must supply, and what evidence will be returned.
6. 6

   Co-design a differentiated plan

   Build the sequence with representatives of the people who will participate. Vary entry points, coaching, examples, practice opportunities, and pacing while protecting a common purpose.

   • Make participation expectations, confidentiality boundaries, time commitments, and available supports clear.
   • Ensure voluntary wellness or clinical supports are not confused with evaluation or employment requirements.
7. 7

   Learn, apply, reflect, and receive support

   Move beyond presentation by cycling through modeling, rehearsal, authentic application, peer or coach feedback, examination of evidence, and revision.

   • Use real cases carefully, protecting student and employee privacy.
   • Schedule follow-through while the learning can still influence current work.
8. 8

   Monitor impact without creating surveillance

   Study access, implementation, educator experience, workplace conditions, and student effects using the least intrusive evidence that can answer the question.

   • Explain what information is collected, who can see it, and how it will—and will not—be used.
   • Share findings with participants and decide whether to sustain, adapt, expand, or stop the plan.