Don't send your first-year teacher and your 20-year veteran to the same PD

Your first-year teacher and your 20-year veteran sat through the same PD session this week. One of them needed the basics explained slowly. The other needed to be trusted to lead part of it. Instead they both got the same slide deck, built for nobody in particular.

A striking share of new teachers leave within their first few years, and a flat one-size PD calendar is part of why it happens.

It tells your newest hires they’re on their own. It tells your veterans their two decades didn’t earn them anything different this year either. If your school is still running PD as one script for every experience level, request a custom PD plan built around where your people actually are.

Here’s the mechanism underneath that gap: new teachers haven’t built pattern recognition yet, so they need something modeled slowly and explicitly. Veterans already have that pattern recognition, so walking them through the same slow modeling wastes the exact expertise you’re trying to keep them for.

You don’t need a full PD rewrite to act on that by Monday, just one session already on your calendar, split at the fifteen-minute mark. Teachers in year one or two move to a separate room for fundamentals, walked through slowly by someone other than the main presenter. Everyone with three or more years stays in the main room and goes straight into the deeper work, and if you can, hand one veteran ten minutes to lead a piece of it themselves instead of just sitting through it.

Close the loop afterward: ask the veteran who led what worked and what they’d change, and ask the newer teachers what they still need explained slower. One split session tells your whole staff you see the difference between them. The follow-up conversation tells you whether the split actually helped, so you know whether to run it again next month.

Reply and tell me what you tried, or what’s stopped you.

Wednesday I’m publishing three things no teacher has time for in month one, done for them, the time-back toolkit paid subscribers get first. If you lead people drowning in month one prep, that post is worth putting in front of them.

Rae

P.S. If you’re a teacher reading this and you’ve sat through PD that clearly wasn’t built for where you are, that’s exactly the gap we help schools close. Nominate your school for PD that actually matches your experience level.