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A gifted education specialist explains how to energize professional development while minding your budget.

Effective professional development walks that fine line between satisfying the teachers and satisfying building-level, district-level, state-level, or national-level expectations of what teachers need to be learning. If we focus solely on what teachers request, some important topics could be overlooked. But if we focus solely on fulfilling bureaucratic expectations, the teachers can become a less-than-receptive audience.

My district has implemented a few strategies in recent years that have proven to be very effective. Perhaps some of these ideas could work in your location as well. • Give teachers a role in planning

Exposing ourselves to traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas — notions that may seem quite foreign to most of us — is a good exercise in lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. "Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perception," says de Bono.

Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking in the strict sense, but doing so is a good exercise in stretching ourselves and really beginning to think differently about visuals and design in our everyday professional lives.

Kanso (簡素) Simplicity or elimination of clutter.