Elena Aguilar - The PD Book

Every last detail of the learning experience is anticipated and planned.

Facilitators skillfully execute the learning plan and adapt, responding to learners when necessary.

Facilitators are reflective, see themselves as learners, have a high degree of emotional intelligence and self‐awareness, and can motivate people and inspire them to take risks and to stretch outside of their comfort zones.

These are the conditions for learning. We've taken these, and everything we know about designing and facilitating professional development, and categorized them into seven habits. To help you remember them, we've also come up with an acronym: PARTY. This stands for: Purpose, Audience, Routines, Technique, and You. We hope that Figure 0.1will help you remember the core ideas and habits in this book.

Habits are behaviors that you enact so often that you internalize them and they become routine. For example, you probably brush your teeth every day without having to think about how to angle the toothbrush—you just do it. Once a behavior is a habit, it doesn't take as much cognitive, physical, or emotional energy as when you started.

Figure 0.1 How to Create Transformative PD: PARTY!

Many of the strategies we'll describe in this book might sound like they'd take a lot of time and energy—and they do at first. But if you practice them over and over, you'll eventually find yourself doing them with much less intentional labor than you needed at first. Once you reach a stage of mastery or what's also called unconscious competence (Broadwell, 1969), the habit will be ingrained—and possibly almost effortless.

But let's back up, because a habit emerges from a belief: You brush your teeth because you believe that dental hygiene is important and brushing will prolong the health of your teeth. Beneath every habit in this book are beliefs that uphold it. We will make those beliefs explicit to increase your investment in mastering the habits. Table 0.2summarizes the habits and content of this book. You'll also see how the habit contributes to a condition for learning.

Table 0.2 The Seven Habits

You might notice that Purpose, Audience, Routines, and Technique each get their own chapter, but none of the habits explicitly addresses you, or the Y in the acronym PARTY. That's because who you are—your behaviors, beliefs, and ways of being—are addressed in every habit. Think of the Y as reminding us of you, of the importance of your presence and of what you bring to every aspect of transformative PD.

For PD to be transformative, it helps if an organization is committed to being a learning organization . In a learning organization, everyone is committed to their learning, everyone is expected to learn, and everyone learns. This value shows up in goals and priorities, in evaluations, and in the adult culture. Table 0.3offers a description of a learning organization. As you read each indicator, note whether there's evidence in your organization of the indicator—maybe jot down “yes,” “no,” or “some” in the margin.

We include this here to acknowledge the organizational context in which you lead and facilitate PD. If you work in an organization that doesn't have any of these indicators of being a learning organization and you are committed to designing and delivering transformative PD, we want to acknowledge that it's going to be hard—not impossible, but hard. If this is the situation you're in, you'll need to address the larger organizational culture, while also implementing the strategies we're sharing with you.

Table 0.3 Indicators of a Learning Organization

Source: Based on Garvin, Edmondson, and Gino (2008).

When you became a teacher, it's likely that you formed a vision for who you wanted to be based on two things: who you aspired to emulate, and who you didn't want to be like. This may have been a conscious process or an unconscious one. But often a vision is shaped by what we've experienced and by what we strive to replicate and what we want to reject.