In this blog, we discuss how Knowles Teacher Initiative supports Fellows once they identify themselves as teacher leaders to support the professional learning of others. The principles that we share to guide the facilitation of teacher professional learning are grounded in inquiry, equity, and teacher leadership.

Picture this: You’re putting away equipment from your last period’s experiment, and resetting the room. This is not a time for students, but for your colleagues. They begin to trickle in, some fresh from their classrooms, others balancing coffee cups, half-eaten snacks, or stacks of student work. Conversations bounce around the room. You hear snippets of stories of students, tasks that went sideways, updates on testing schedules, weekend plans, and everything in between. You know that these are the people who truly understand what it’s like to navigate lesson plans, manage classrooms, and pour their hearts into teaching every single day. They’ve carved out time, precious time, to be here with you, hoping this session will be worth it. This is beginning to feel like more than just another meeting. It is one of those moments you want to get right. You want them to walk away inspired, supported, and equipped with ideas they can use in their classrooms tomorrow.

After the first prompts are shared and table discussions begin, you begin to consider that this feels like the beginning of something with greater potential. The conversations unfolding here offer an opportunity to build something meaningful, perhaps even transformative. This is no longer merely sharing thoughts; it’s a chance to create something powerful together: a space where everyone feels valued, heard, and connected. It’s about building trust and community while sharing ideas that truly matter for the benefit of your students.

As educators who have experienced both the pressure and the excitement of facilitating professional learning, we understand the importance of creating an environment where teachers can thrive. That’s why we want to share how three facilitation principles, developed by teachers, can guide you in crafting professional learning experiences that not only resonate deeply but also strengthen a community of educators committed to meaningful, lasting growth for both teachers and students. When you are in the role of professional learning facilitator, you are also a builder of community, a catalyst for growth, and an integral contributor to teacher and student learning. And that’s a pretty incredible role to play.

Value the Knowledge and Experience of Teachers

Remember this: Your colleagues are walking into the room with experience and insight, content expertise, unique perspectives, and a wealth of practical classroom knowledge. Acknowledging this isn’t just respectful; it’s essential for making professional learning truly impactful. The best learning experiences aren’t about sharing wisdom from just one source. They’re about creating space for shared learning. To make this happen, you need to tap into and elevate the ideas, questions, and motivations of everyone in the room.

How to Put This Principle Into Action:

1. Build Connections Through Community: Start with simple connectors or personal check-ins to foster a sense of belonging. Activities like sharing an artifact from their teaching practice can lead to meaningful conversations.
2. Facilitate Authentic Conversations: Kick things off with activities that invite teachers to share their experiences. For example, ask participants to reflect on a recent classroom challenge and how they handled it. This sparks valuable peer-to-peer learning right away.
3. Support Practitioner Inquiry: Encourage participants to dig deeper into their practice. Use structured discussions, like “Critical Friends” protocols, to help us reflect and grow together.
4. Provide Time for Reflection: Build in moments for participants to pause and think. Guided journaling prompts like, “What’s one way my thinking has changed today?” help us to internalize the learning.

Respect the Complexity of Teaching Contexts

Circle back to this often: At the start of every professional learning session, the most pressing question is: “What’s the challenge you’re currently facing [related to the focus of the PD session]?” This is because every teacher’s classroom is unique, and one-size-fits-all solutions rarely work. Effective professional learning honors this complexity and allows space for teachers to discuss with each other how to adapt strategies to their contexts. This prompt shifts the dynamic, making the session immediately relevant to everyone involved. Teachers are encouraged to share a range of challenges about the focus, from managing diverse needs within a group to finding effective engagement strategies. These context issues connected to your learning goals then become the foundation for your discussions and activities, ensuring that the learning is directly connected to the experiences each person is facing.

How to Put This Principle Into Action:

1. Model Flexibility: Share multiple examples of how strategies can be adapted for different classrooms. Highlight successes and struggles to show there’s no single “right” way.
2. Create Safe Spaces for Vulnerability: Frame setbacks as learning opportunities. Model this by sharing your own stories of lessons that didn’t go as planned—and what you learned from them.
3. Embed Contextual Follow-Up: Offer to arrange peer support after the session. This provides an opportunity to refine strategies and troubleshoot challenges as participants apply their learning, allowing others to benefit from the shared insights as well.

Invite a Critical Disposition

Welcome this: One of the most powerful things you can do as a facilitator is invite critical reflection. Great professional learning isn’t about offering perfect solutions; it’s about sparking thoughtful conversations. Sharing finished products can often feel intimidating because they seem “too perfect.” By reframing with a message that it’s okay to critique, pick, and choose what works for you, you focus on what’s realistic and doable. This approach encourages teachers to be critical consumers of professional resources, empowering them to adapt ideas to fit their contexts instead of feeling pressured to follow them exactly as presented. What’s more, this critical consumption leads to improvements on the original resource. Your teachers will find ways to enhance it, tailor it better for their needs, or innovate on it in ways that others can learn from.

How to Put This Principle Into Action:

1. Encourage Productive Skepticism: Ask questions like, “What’s a potential downside of this approach?” or “How might you tweak this for your students?” This fosters thoughtful discussions.
2. Analyze Examples and Counterexamples: Look at both successful and less effective scenarios. Reflecting on what went wrong can be just as insightful as celebrating wins.
3. Gather and Use Participant Feedback: Collect input during and after the session to continuously improve. Tools like anonymous surveys or sticky note boards make it easy for everyone to share their thoughts.
4. Focus on Process Over Perfection: Share resources or strategies that are still in progress. Collaborating to refine these together creates a more engaging and relatable experience.

Wrapping It Up

Facilitating professional learning is about more than sharing strategies—it’s about creating spaces where teachers feel valued, supported, and inspired. When we honor the expertise in the room, respect the complexity of teaching, and invite critical reflection, we nurture communities where educators can thrive together.