All activities Professional learning
Coaches take apart a one-size-fits-all AI PD day and rebuild it as a choice menu, grounded in a real needs assessment, adult learning principles, and teaching strategies that already work.
Many campuses have lived through the AI PD day: a keynote about the future, a demo of eight tools, everyone creates an account, and nothing changes on Monday. In this design session, coaches analyze a fictional district's original agenda and the comments teachers left afterward, sort a draft needs assessment into questions worth keeping, rewriting, or cutting, and then rebuild the day as a menu. Every menu option has to name who it is for, the adult learning principle it honors, the research-based teaching strategy it serves, and the evidence teachers will bring back. The menu includes paths for skeptics, for privacy, and for deciding not to use AI.
Hook
Ask: "Think of a PD day you sat through that changed nothing in your classroom. What made it that way?" Partners trade answers for one minute. Then read two teacher comments from Handout A aloud. Say: "Today we redesign that day, and we hold our design to the same standard we hold lessons: what evidence will show that teachers learned something they use with students?"
Facilitator noteExpect answers like "it wasn't for my grade," "we just watched," and "no follow-up." Park them on the chart; each maps to a principle.
Explore
Teams read Handout A. For each agenda block, they place a sticky note on the principles chart: one color for a principle the block honors, the other for a principle it ignores, with the block's time written on the note. Then each team names the one design choice that did the most damage and the principle it broke.
Facilitator noteMost teams land on "everyone creates an account on the same tool." It ignores experience and choice, and it quietly skips the privacy question for teachers and students.
Practice
Teams sort the Handout B strips onto the mat: Keep, Rewrite, or Cut. For every Rewrite, they write the better version on the back of the strip. Then they add two questions of their own: one that surfaces a teacher's classroom goal, and one that gives a skeptical or worried teacher a safe way to say so. Say: "A needs assessment should tell you what to offer, not just which tool is popular."
Facilitator noteWatch for teams keeping "Which AI tools would you like to learn?" It measures interest in tools, not needs. The question to surface is what teachers want students to be able to do.
Create
Using the revised needs assessment and the teacher comments as their data, teams fill in Handout C with 4–6 menu options. Each option names: who it is for, its format, the adult learning principle it honors, the research-based strategy it serves, and the evidence teachers bring back. Require variety in format, for example a hands-on workshop, a lesson study group, a self-paced playlist of short videos and articles, a podcast listening circle with a shared notebook, a video self-review, or a short micro-credential. Three options are required on every menu: a path for teachers not ready to use AI, a privacy and student data path, and a path where the outcome might be deciding not to use AI in a lesson.
Facilitator notePush on the strategy column. "Learn the chatbot" is not a strategy. "Use worked examples: students find the error in an AI-generated solution before solving on their own" is. The tool must serve a practice that already works: explicit modeling and think-alouds, worked examples before independent practice, sentence-level writing, or claim-and-evidence argumentation.
Apply
Teams swap menus. Each team reads the three teacher comments on Handout A marked with a star and asks, for each: "Which option would this teacher choose? What would they bring back? Would they feel respected or managed?" If a teacher has no good option, the reviewing team writes the gap on a sticky note and returns the menu.
Facilitator noteThe skeptic comment is the real test. A menu that only offers "getting started with AI" treats skepticism as a skills gap rather than a professional judgment worth hearing.
Debrief
Ask: "How effective are my professional development initiatives in addressing teachers' needs? How would you know by November?" Each team names the one piece of classroom evidence from its menu it would collect first and how teachers would share it.
Facilitator noteGood answers name student work, not attendance or satisfaction ratings.
Transfer
Each coach writes one question from the revised needs assessment they will send before their next PD session, and one format from the menu they have never offered and will try.
Facilitator noteA needs assessment sent two weeks ahead, with results shared back to teachers, is itself a signal that their input shapes the day.
The session is built for paper: the agenda and comments are printed, the needs assessment is a physical sort, and the menu is built on an enlarged Handout C. For a campus with limited devices, the revised needs assessment can go out on a half-sheet in teachers' boxes and be tallied by hand at a coaching team meeting.
Teams can build their revised needs assessment in a district-approved form tool during the Practice step, then use the form's summary view to plan the menu. Publish the final menu as a single page where teachers choose a path, and host the self-paced playlist options in your LMS so teachers can return to them. In a virtual session, run the sort as a drag-and-drop on a shared slide with three columns.
Does it need a screen? The redesign itself is better unplugged, because the thinking is about people and principles. A form tool earns its place when the needs assessment goes out for real: it lets you sort responses by role and grade band and share results back with teachers quickly.
What you should be able to see or collect if it worked.
Coaches redesign a one-size-fits-all AI PD day into a choice menu based on a needs assessment and adult learning principles.
Send a revised needs assessment before your next PD session, share the results back with teachers, and offer at least three paths. After the session, collect one piece of classroom evidence from each path and bring it to your coaching team.
