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I generally keep an agenda for my training sessions and then make sure that I provide a brief video highlighting each topic.

I provide the teachers with a playlist highlighting the more advanced tools, such as widgets, embedding videos, and inputting a variety of multimedia.

By providing faculty with additional tools and information that may be more challenging, they have the option to accelerate their professional development according to their comfort level and individual needs.

To prepare a one-size-fits-all (or most) session does everyone a disservice.

the three tools and tactics featured in this post will provide an effective means to gauge the needs of your audience and chart your course to effectively support them.

Before fine-tuning content for a particular session, I start out with a Google Form and a list of suggested topics (e.g. Google for Research, Nearpod, Kahoot, Student Projects with iPad, Workflow with eBackpack) that I perceive to be campus or department needs.

In this Education Week article, Connecticut educator Christopher Doyle worries that many educators are not taking very good care of themselves – not balancing the intense challenges of work with family, friends, love, sleep, vacations, exercise, good nutrition, emotional health, and civic engagement. “Like American society at large,” says Doyle, “ many of us are overworked, stretched thin financially, and torn between roles as spouses, parents, and employees… Not unlike other professionals devoted to nurture, such as doctors, teachers are measured – and measure themselves – against an idealized image of excellence that involves incessant work.”

Teachers occupy the middle to lower tiers of the American middle class – whose wages have been stagnant for some time.

Stressed, workaholic educators are not in the best position to help students achieve some kind of balance in their overscheduled lives.

The telecomm company used design thinking to come up with a different approach: Rather than inject “training” into employees, it studied the job of a retail sales agent over the first nine months and developed a “journey map” showing what people need to know the first day, the first week, the first month, and then over the first few quarters.

What this process revealed is that there are some urgent learning needs that must be addressed immediately, and then there are people to meet, systems to learn, products to understand, and many other processes to master over the first year. And of course, much of this involves getting to know customers, product experts, and fundamentals of sales and customer service.

few schools provide systematic, long-term, programs to help teachers master their craft. Pre-service training is brief, mentoring is spotty, one-time workshops abound. Independent schools have often made a virtue of giving teachers a classroom and wishing them well—autonomy to the able, too often "sink or swim."

The goal must be to provide ongoing professional development that moves an entire faculty forward, consistent with the school's vision and core values.

New teachers, whether experienced or not, participate in a three-year program—yes, three years—of thoughtfully scaffolded skills matched to the school's chosen direction for teaching and learning. Some topics reinforce the school's traditional strengths; others reflect the major strains of innovation