All activities Professional learning
Coaches experience a research journal club as learners, reading a practice article with a skeptic's eye, then design their own PD series around real teacher needs and adult learning principles.
A journal club is one of the simplest ways to keep a staff connected to research, and one of the easiest to run badly: an article nobody chose, a summary nobody needed, and no change on Monday. Coaches first take part in a journal club on a fictional practice article about teaching students to pause before sharing online, practicing the same claim-checking they want teachers to teach. Then they step back, name the adult learning principles that made it work or fail, read a set of teacher needs profiles, and design a journal club series built on what their teachers actually need.
Hook
Each person writes two words for the best PD they've experienced and two for the worst. Tables lay the six Principle cards from Handout B face up and place their words next to the principle each one honored or ignored. Ask a few tables: "Which principle shows up most in your worst PD?"
Facilitator note"Need to know" and "Experience" are usually the most violated: PD that never said why, and PD that treated a room of veterans as blank slates.
Explore
Assign roles at each table. Everyone reads Handout A (8 minutes). Then run the four-question protocol, with each role leading one: Summarizer: "What does it claim?" Skeptic: "How do they know? What's missing: comparison, sample, who measured?" Lateral Reader: "Who is behind this, and what would we check outside the article?" (with a device, search the sponsor claim; unplugged, list the searches). Classroom Connector: "What's one thing worth trying, and what would we need to see to believe it worked?" Each table writes a one-line verdict: try it, try a piece of it, or skip it, and why.
Facilitator noteStrong tables notice three things: the results come from a student self-report survey with no comparison group, the author's school also adopted the sponsor's AI fact-check app during the same period, and "the chatbot confirmed it" is not verification. They still find a routine worth trying.
Debrief
Ask: "Which adult learning principles did that journal club honor? Where did it fall short?" Tables move Principle cards into two piles: honored and missed. Point out what was deliberate: roles gave everyone a job (self-concept), the Classroom Connector made it problem-centered (orientation), and the verdict left room for professional judgment. Then name what was missing: nobody chose the article, and nobody asked what they already knew.
Facilitator noteThis is the "do it as learners, debrief as designers" move. Name it so coaches can reuse it.
Explore
Tables read the six Teacher Profile cards. Each profile gives what the teacher says they need and one piece of evidence from their classroom. Tables group the profiles into two or three journal club tracks and note where the stated need and the evidence disagree. Then they write the three questions they'd put on a short needs survey, plus one non-survey source of evidence they'd look at (student work, walkthrough notes, a PLC agenda).
Facilitator notePush on the gap between request and evidence: the teacher who asks for "AI tools" may need help with how students check sources. Self-report is a starting point, not the needs assessment.
Create
Each coach, or campus pair, completes Handout C for a three-session journal club on media literacy, digital citizenship, or AI for their own teachers. Required: how teachers will help choose the articles, a role structure, at least one article vetted with the same four questions, a classroom try-it between sessions, and what teacher practice or student evidence will show the series changed something.
Facilitator noteCirculate and ask, "How will you know by session 3 whether anything changed in classrooms?" A completion count or a satisfaction survey doesn't count.
Practice
Pairs swap planners. Presenter: two minutes to explain. Partner: one "I like…" and one "I wonder…" tied to a Principle card. Presenter responds, then they switch. Each coach revises one line of their planner before leaving the pair.
Facilitator noteKeep the "I wonder" genuinely a question. It models the feedback culture you want in the journal club itself.
Transfer
Each coach drafts the two-sentence invitation they'll send teachers for session 1, and it must answer the "need to know" question: why this, why now, and what's in it for your students.
Facilitator noteCoaches who want to can read theirs aloud. It's a quick check on whether the invitation honors the principles or just announces a meeting.
Everything runs on paper: the article, the role protocol, the cards, and the planner. The Lateral Reader lists the searches they would run and the facilitator reads the answer from the step note, just as the unplugged lateral read works for students.
Share the article in a collaborative annotation tool so each role annotates in a different color, and put the planner in a shared folder so coaches can borrow each other's designs. In a virtual session, run journal club tables in breakout rooms and the tuning protocol in pairs. Coaches can later run their own journal clubs asynchronously with the same roles in a discussion thread.
Does it need a screen? Shared annotation leaves a visible record of each role's thinking, which the coach can use to see who's questioning evidence and who's only summarizing, and that becomes needs data for the next session. The live lateral search makes the sponsor question concrete.
What you should be able to see or collect if it worked.
Coaches check a practice article's claims and evidence, then plan teacher learning on pausing before sharing, a digital citizenship habit for students.
Send your invitation this week and run session 1 within a month. Between sessions, visit or co-teach the classroom try-it with at least two teachers and bring what students produced to session 2.
