How can districts design professional learning that treats teachers as the adult learners they are?

In this episode, Allie Rodman—a former teacher, coach, assistant principal, school board member, and author of two books on professional learning—explains why the field has spent a decade building SEL programs for students but never did the same work for the adults in the building. She shares how sitting on a school board revealed the gap between what districts say they value and what they actually fund, why teacher voice means co-creating from the start rather than asking for input at the end, and what it looks like when over 90% of teachers choose personalized learning—even when it means using their own time.

Allie walks through the five disciplines of whole educator development (attunement, alignment, perspective, collective efficacy, organizational learning), reveals what her third book on facilitation design will tackle, and paints a picture of what schools could look like if we treated educators as adult learners with voice, agency, and the right to grow as whole people.

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Key Insights

• The Differentiation Opportunity: Applying the same personalization principles to adult learning that we use with students
• Voice vs. Choice: How co-creating professional learning from the planning stage differs from asking for input after decisions are made
• Adult SEL Is Missing: We built socio-emotional learning systems for students but never created the same structures for educators
• Attunement as a Discipline: Why setting goals around "being" and "relating"—not just "doing"—is essential for whole educators
• The Gray Space Matters: How facilitators can extend learning beyond synchronous sessions through intentional collaboration design
• AI Needs Human Context: Where generative tools fall short in professional learning design—and how to use them responsibly
• Portrait of an Educator: What it would look like to capture the full picture of educator growth beyond single observation snapshots
• The North Star Is Joy: When educators smile more, pause for real conversations, and leave work at a sustainable pace, the system is working

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