Professional Learning and Leadership
Domain 5 - Professional Learning and Leadership tests how specialists build teacher capacity and lead change. The focus is adult learning, coaching, collaborative structures, and implementation.
Leadership rules
- Adult learners need relevance, choice, and immediate application; one-shot workshops rarely change practice.
- Job-embedded professional learning includes coaching cycles, lesson study, and PLC data meetings.
- The Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) stages concerns - awareness, informational, personal, management, consequence, collaboration, refocusing - and leaders should respond to the current stage.
- Distributed leadership shares expertise rather than concentrating it in one specialist.
- Evaluate professional learning with more than satisfaction surveys: Kirkpatrick levels move from reaction to learning, behavior, and results.
Worked example
A district rolls out a new LMS. Teachers complain, 'This is one more thing.' A strong response is not a mandatory refresher. It is to survey concerns, find that many are at the personal or management stage, and offer differentiated sessions: a basics lab for management concerns and a coaching cycle for teachers ready to redesign assignments. The reasoning: the intervention matches the adoption stage.
Traps
- Designing professional learning around tools rather than student learning problems.
- Assuming resistance is laziness rather than an unmet concern.
- Treating a single training as implementation.
- Confusing leadership with compliance monitoring.