Great PD is Part of Change Management.
This article is part of the 8 steps for Great Professional Development series.
Have you ever participated in any professional development training that you thought was great? The best training you have had in ages, but then couldn’t find time to apply what you learned. Newsflash, that was a great event, one part of the Professional Development Journey. Professional Development (PD), not to be confused with training, is always associated with change. The purpose of PD is to develop awareness, knowledge, dispositions and/or skills with the intent to move from some current state to an envisioned future state. Orchestrating that move is known as Change Management, of which training is only a small part.
Great PD is Part of Change Management.
The field of Change Management is mostly associated with organizational change and was popularized by John Kotter in the 1990’s with his 8 stage process for leading change. Within the educational context we have Michael Fullan’s 8 Forces for Change. 8 seems to be the magic number when trying to change something. But, whether it be 8 stages or 8 forces, one thing holds true in all Change Management processes, training plays a small part and at that, it comes very late in the process. Strict adherence to Change Management as a process is crucial for effecting any change, regardless if the change is personal to your practice or in service of an initiative for your school. It is for this reason, when planning any PD, we must always be mindful of these stages:
Stage 1 - It all begins with the question Why? Why is this change important? Why do I/we need to change? Kotter wants to light a fire in the organization and Fullen wants you to make your Moral purpose explicit so you can be constantly reminded of why you are investing precious time and resources for professional growth.
Stage 2 - Change is about people. So, you better get the right people ‘on the bus’ from the start. Start building the capacity for change by identifying early the people that can remove barriers and support learning so that we can realize that envisioned future state.
Stage 3 - Speaking of that envisioned future state, with the right people engaged from the very beginning you can craft a motivating and empowering vision to begin getting buy-in from the wider organization. Buy-in is critical to the learning journey and will ensure the right mindset when the learning begins.
Stage 4 - You need to write a compelling narrative for change that learning communities understand and can easily retell to each other. A narrative, supported by guiding policies, that establishes what we want our learning communities to achieve, as well as how they can do it.
Stage 5 - Remove barriers to change. Note we haven’t even begun training yet. What’s the point of developing capacity if we leave in place obstacles that will impede our staff’s ability to apply learning and new skills.
Stage 6 - Finally, we can begin training, but start small with the leadership and ensure they get some good early wins. Alignment is often the greatest win at this stage.
Stage 7 - TRAIN TRAIN TRAIN and ramp up the communications to share what is being learned and how it is being implemented. This is when the culture of an organization starts to shift.
Stage 8 - Consolidate your victories and institutionalize them. This requires a great deal of coordination and energy to cause a significant shift in the organization.
So, to have great PD, you need to do a lot of work up front. To have great virtual PD, requires the same process, but the actual training requires twice the amount of time to plan the facilitation as there is much more scripting involved, especially with how to encourage engagement and interaction. An upside, though, once you embrace virtual PD, and the tools that enable it, you create significant efficiencies to move through the initial stages of change much more quickly.
Great PD begins with the question, ‘Why?’. There is no easy way to answer this. The ‘why’ is often something we see and feel, but we struggle to put a name on it. Sometimes in our rush to label it from our own perspective, we do so in a way that limits our ability to influence others, as we communicate this need for change from our own perspective. Most educational leaders, and leaders in general, struggle to articulate the need for change. They struggle because they are often alone, or in very insular groups, when identifying and conceptualizing the need for change.
