District leaders are under pressure to do more than deliver professional learning. They’re being asked to support increasingly diverse educator needs, scale learning across their organizations and demonstrate measurable impact, all while respecting educators’ limited time.
During a recent webinar, Advancing Professional Learning in K-12: How Leaders Are Driving Real Change, Robyn Hammontree, Vice President of Academic Partnerships at D2L, sat down with Andrea McComb, Director of Professional Learning and Development at the British Columbia Principals’ & Vice-Principals’ Association (BCPVPA); Sharon Lau, District Principal at Surrey School District; and Patrick Hamilton, Superintendent of Student Achievement and Program Services at Upper Grand District School Board, to discuss how they’re tackling those challenges in practice.
At the start of the webinar, attendees were asked about their biggest professional learning priorities and challenges. The largest group of respondents (38%) identified measuring the impact of professional learning as their top priority, while 42% said the biggest challenge educators face is applying learning in practice.
The results reflected many of the themes that would come up throughout the discussion.
“A lot of folks are really wondering ‘how do we measure that impact?’” Hammontree shared. “How do we, once we’ve done all the work, know whether it worked and how we can report on it?”
Although the speakers represented different organizations, many of their experiences echoed one another. The conversation repeatedly came back to themes such as relevance, accessibility, ongoing support, and finding ways to help learning translate into practice.
The Biggest Challenge? Making Learning Stick
Professional learning opportunities are everywhere. The harder question is what happens after educators leave a workshop, complete a course, or attend a training session.
“Sometimes you would see people forgetting what they’ve learned in a workshop, or they would struggle with putting what they’ve learned into practice,” Sharon Lau shared.
That challenge prompted her team to rethink how learning is delivered across the district.
“One of the problems that we really want to have an answer for is figuring out how to make learning stick in our organization.”
Rather than treating professional learning as a one-time event, Surrey Schools focused on creating resources educators can revisit long after a session ends.
Workshop attendance is relatively easy to measure. Understanding whether learning continues after the session ends is much harder. Several panelists described the importance of helping educators revisit resources, access support when questions arise, and apply new ideas once they’re back in their schools and classrooms.
Generic Learning Is Giving Way to Personalized Learning
Another recurring theme was the importance of context.
Like many organizations, Surrey Schools once relied heavily on externally developed content. While those resources were valuable, they couldn’t always reflect the district’s specific priorities, language, and practices.
“These courses are quite generic in nature,” Lau shared, “because they’re built to be applicable to different types of learners across different school districts.”
The district found stronger engagement when professional learning was designed around local realities.
“Learning sticks a little bit more because they can relate to the scenarios and examples that we provide in the course.”
When educators see themselves reflected in the learning experience, they’re more likely to engage with the content and apply it in practice. Personalization doesn’t necessarily mean creating something different for every learner. Sometimes it’s as simple as using familiar examples, addressing local challenges and speaking the language educators use every day.
Making Professional Learning Continuous Instead of Event-Based
Several panelists described moving away from the traditional model of professional development, where learning happens during a workshop and then largely ends when participants return to work.
Instead, they’re creating opportunities for educators to engage with learning over time.
At Surrey Schools, online learning resources complement in-person sessions by providing ongoing access to materials and support through Brightspace.
“Our employees can go back to their Brightspace courses as many times as they want. They can find the guidance and the answers that they need to do their job,” Lau said. “We know that they need it most when they’re doing the actual job.”
Hamilton described a similar shift in thinking at Upper Grand District School Board. Traditional conference-style professional learning created valuable learning experiences, but districts often struggled to understand the long-term impact.
As he explained, the district began moving away from what he described as the traditional “hotel conference” model, where educators spend a day away from their classrooms and then return to their work. Teachers were asking for learning that was easier to access and more closely connected to the realities of their day-to-day practice.
Similarly, McComb discussed the importance of viewing courses, workshops, and professional development opportunities as pieces of a broader journey.
“We want them to be part of the foundation of a learning pathway and a learning pathway that creates communities of practice.”
That perspective recognizes that meaningful learning rarely happens in a single session. Growth occurs over time through reflection, application, collaboration, and continued access to support.
Creating Space for Reflection
One of the more unique ideas discussed during the webinar focused on something often overlooked in professional learning: creating intentional space to think.
McComb explained that this concept first took shape within the organization’s D2L Brightspace learning environment before expanding into in-person and virtual professional learning experiences.
“In this very complex, rapidly moving period in education, we need space to think.”
As part of that approach, participants are encouraged to take what the organization calls an “EIR pause” focused on equity, inclusion and reconciliation. Before setting goals or taking action, educators are invited to reflect on questions such as whose perspectives may be missing, what assumptions they may need to challenge, and whose voices they should listen to more deeply.
The goal is not simply to move quickly through professional learning, but to create opportunities for deeper reflection and more intentional decision-making.
As McComb noted, Brightspace ultimately became “a foundation for the growth outwards of these learning pathways.”
Consistency Matters More Than We May Realize
For Patrick Hamilton, one of the biggest challenges wasn’t a lack of professional learning opportunities. It was helping educators find what they needed within an increasingly complex landscape of resources.
Like many districts, Upper Grand District School Board found itself managing content distributed across multiple platforms and locations. The result was often confusion and frustration, particularly for educators trying to locate information quickly.
To address this, the district focused on creating clearer pathways to essential information and learning resources.
Underlying that work was a simple realization: even excellent content loses value if educators struggle to find it when they need it.
But when resources are organized, accessible and easy to return to, educators can spend less time searching and more time learning.
Listening Should Be the Starting Point
When asked what advice they would offer other leaders, the panelists consistently emphasized the importance of listening to educators.
For McComb, that means looking beyond surface-level feedback.
“You have to start with your learner. And I make the distinction between listening to what they’re experiencing versus what they might be complaining about.”
She explained that while complaints can signal an underlying issue, educators often experience the same challenge differently. Understanding those nuances can help leaders uncover the barriers, pressures, and support needs that might otherwise remain hidden.
Hamilton echoed the importance of understanding how expectations around professional learning have changed in recent years.
“After COVID, our teachers didn’t want to learn that way anymore. They didn’t want access once or twice a year. They wanted access every day. They wanted to be able to get what they needed when they needed it.”
The districts and organizations represented on the panel may serve different audiences, but their advice was remarkably consistent: start by understanding your learners.
Bringing Learning Closer To Practice
One of the clearest takeaways from the discussion was that professional learning works best when it fits naturally into educators’ everyday work.
Across topics ranging from onboarding and leadership development to district-wide initiatives and communities of practice, the panelists described efforts to make learning more relevant, accessible and sustainable. Their approaches varied, but all were focused on helping educators bridge the gap between learning something new and using it in practice.
As Lau put it:
“It’s been helping us as a district to build that bridge from theory to practice.”
Across the discussion, the speakers described different strategies, audiences, and challenges. Yet many arrived at similar conclusions. Professional learning is most effective when it feels relevant, remains accessible over time and connects directly to the work educators do every day.
For many districts, that connection between learning and practice may be where the greatest opportunity for impact exists.
Looking for more practical strategies to scale professional learning, support educators and measure impact? Watch the full webinar on demand. And if you’d like to talk K-12 strategy, you can book a meeting with Robyn Hammontree.
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