Reading My Way Into PD Coordination

As I prepare for my role as PD Coordinator at my school, I'm doing what I always do: trying to get ready by reading and researching and looking for the best ideas and practices to bring back to my school. While researching books on the topic, I put together a short reading list:

1. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni – I wrote a review here for thie book: https://www.misterglobal.xyz/post/book-review-the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team

2. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle

3. Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek

4. The PD Book: 7 Habits That Transform Professional Development by Elena Aguilar and Lori Cohen – This is the book I'll be reviewing here.

   
   

This book is genuinely great for anyone trying to figure out how to approach PD in a school setting. After accepting the position of PD Coordinator at the end of last year, I had a few meetings with our head of school to figure out exactly what I should be doing and what the school's PD priorities are, and to start putting together a plan. One idea kept coming back to me throughout those conversations: PD is about culture, not a set of hoops we make teachers jump through. It needs to be a culture that's genuinely transformational — one that makes us better teachers in some real, tangible way. That's one of the challenges I keep sitting with: how do we build a collaborative culture of professional learning across the whole school? The second challenge is how to actually measure the impact of PD. This feels like a big piece that needs real thought — how do we know, concretely, what the impact of our PD actually was?

These two questions are some of the biggest things I need to figure out as PD Coordinator. While reading this book, I found that a few of them were answered — at least from a theoretical standpoint. We'll see how it holds up in practice.

In this review, I'd like to lay out the seven habits the authors outline, with a brief explanation of each, along with the practical ideas and takeaways I plan to put into place at my school.

1.     Determine Purpose

Habit 1, Determine Purpose, argues that professional development only becomes transformative when its purpose is crystal clear — without it, PD turns into something staff merely endure rather than something that changes practice.

Aguilar and Cohen lay out a process for getting to that clarity: starting with the Five Whys, mapping outcomes-gaps-possibilities-priorities to turn purpose into a concrete plan, and then communicating that purpose before, during, and after a session so the learning genuinely lands with participants. They close by insisting that purpose isn't real until its impact is measured, offering multiple lenses for doing so.

There are two things from this chapter I definitely want to carry forward. Firstly is the Five Whys exercise, which I plan to use in the Staff Orientation PD session in the first week of school before students return, to make sure we're anchoring the year's PD in a purpose that goes deeper than the surface topic.

Secondly is Guskey's five-measures framework for assessing impact (reactions, learning, organizational change, use of new skills, and student outcomes), which gives me a much more complete way to evaluate whether our PD is actually working, beyond just gut feel or a quick feedback form.

2.     Engage Emotions

Habit 2, Engage Emotions, argues that because PD is fundamentally about learning and growth, it can never be separated from emotion — human beings feel things constantly, and a transformative facilitator must learn to understand, expect, and embrace those emotions rather than treat them as a distraction to push past.

Aguilar and Cohen frame emotions as messengers carrying real information about unmet needs, walk facilitators through managing their own triggers and moods, and build toward psychological safety — through emotional intelligence, communication skills, community agreements, and conflict resolution — as the precondition for any real learning to happen, before ultimately pushing past "safety" toward genuinely joyful, energizing learning spaces.

The idea I found most compelling was the chapter's insistence on decolonizing our own emotions, not just our curriculum. As a social studies teacher, I've thought a lot about decolonizing content and whose narratives get centered — but this chapter pushed that thinking further inward: our felt experience of emotion itself (whose anger is "justified," whose assertiveness reads as "leadership" versus "pushy," whose tears are acceptable) is shaped by the same dominant cultural narrative that dictates so much of our behavior and judgment. That reframing — that emotional response isn't neutral or universal but culturally constructed — is something I want to sit with and bring into how I facilitate PD, not just how I teach content.

3.     Navigate Power

Habit 3, Navigate Power, examines where power comes from (position, coercion, reward, expertise, relationships, and information), how people respond to power and authority, and how to navigate the resistance that inevitably arises when power dynamics go unaddressed — grounding this in organizational and behavioral psychology as it applies specifically to PD for teachers.

Compared to the first two habits, I found this chapter less personally insightful; it didn't surface much that felt new to me, though it was useful in putting a spotlight on power as a factor that's always present and often underexamined in how PD gets delivered and managed. The idea that did stick with me was the author's point that encountering resistance doesn't automatically mean a leader should change course — instead, "maybe there's a need to cultivate group emotional intelligence or strengthen commitment to the mission."

As I plan the school-wide PD plan for my school, this reframes how I think about pushback from staff, department heads, or leadership: sometimes the right move isn't to soften the stance but to invest in building a shared sense of team identity and buy-in around the larger mission, so resistance decreases because people feel genuinely on board rather than because the ask was watered down. Ultimately, my main takeaway is that navigating power is both an interpersonal and intrapersonal skill — one I still need to develop deliberately, understanding how it plays out in my specific school context rather than applying it generically.

4.     Anchor in Adult Learning

Habit 4, Anchor in Adult Learning, lays out seven research-based principles for how adults learn best — that adults must feel safe to learn, come to sessions with prior histories and experience, need to know why they're learning something, want agency in their learning, need practice to internalize new skills, approach learning as problem-centered, and, at their core, actually want to learn — arguing that PD fails when facilitators treat teachers like passive recipients rather than adult learners with their own expertise and motivations.

Much of adult learning theory overlaps with principles of child learning too, but it's important to remember that adults and children can't be taught in identical ways. The idea I kept coming back to is that adults are generally more rigid than younger learners because they carry a stronger, more fixed sense of identity — shaped by personality, past experience, and personal wants and needs — and that rigidity has to be accounted for when designing PD.

In practice, that means real buy-in and motivation to grow professionally aren't optional extras; they're the precondition for PD to be transformational rather than just tolerated. Which leaves me with what I see as a core part of my role as a PD leader: it's not enough to design good content — I have to actually get staff to want to learn in the first place.

5.     Design Intentionally

Habit 5, Design Intentionally, walks through the actual process of building a PD session so that every choice — resources, activities, sequencing, timing — has clear intention behind it. Aguilar and Cohen offer three core tools (participant data, guiding planning questions, and the What-Why-How Agenda), then a five-step design process: assess your time honestly (the "portion control" problem of packing too much in), generate three to five specific intended outcomes, select topics and activities using the 20/80 rule, design for gradual release from facilitator-led to participant-led work, and finally finalize the plan with facilitator notes.

What stood out most to me was the What-Why-How Agenda — it mirrors what I already do with students when I open a lesson with clear learning objectives, but seeing it formalized this cleanly for adult PD was genuinely useful. The Why in particular feels foundational: once adults have their why in place, they're ready to actually engage and learn. This connects directly to Simon Sinek's Start with Why — his idea that purpose has to be clear before real growth or movement forward can happen.

My takeaway for designing any PD is that I need to be crystal clear on the why myself first, and then deliberately communicate and build buy-in around that why with my staff, before I can reasonably expect engagement or change — the why isn't just one agenda element among several, it's the foundation the rest of the design rests on.

6.     Attend to Details

Habit 6, Attend to Details, uses the story of Josué — a new teacher whose first PD experience is undermined by wrong locations, unset-up rooms, misspelled name tags, and a flustered presenter — to argue that logistics aren't separate from learning; they're part of what makes adults feel welcomed, valued, and psychologically safe enough to actually engage.

Aguilar and Cohen organize this into seven categories (Context, Partnership, Location, Resources, Communication, Presentation, Closing) with checklists spanning long-term, short-term, and day-of planning. As someone who's naturally detail-oriented, this chapter didn't teach me anything conceptually new — but it did affirm that this instinct isn't just a personality quirk, it's actually a recognized, foundational pillar of transformative PD, not a "nice to have" layered on top of good content.

What was more useful to sit with is where my natural strength might not fully extend: I tend to nail the categories that are tangible and in my control — resources, materials, presentation polish — but categories like Partnership (clarifying roles and expectations with co-facilitators, tech support, or site staff in advance) and Closing (the post-event reflection, appreciations, and a proper follow-up message to participants) are areas I could be more intentional about, since they depend less on my own organization and more on coordinating with others. So the real takeaway isn't "get better at details" — it's making sure my attention to detail covers the whole arc of a PD experience, not just the parts I'm already comfortable managing.

7.     Facilitate Adaptively

Habit 7, Facilitate Adaptively, argues that even the best-planned PD will hit "detours" — a discussion that runs long, a fire alarm, a technical glitch, harm caused by a comment — and that what separates a good facilitator from a struggling one isn't avoiding these moments but responding to them with intention rather than reacting out of stress. Aguilar and Cohen frame this through a five-step process (slow down, consider context, assess the stakes, determine how to proceed, follow up) and root the whole habit in self-knowledge — knowing your strengths, values, and identity so you can recognize your own triggers before they hijack the room. Much of this echoes what I think about as adaptive teaching in the classroom — reading the room and adjusting on the fly isn't a new concept to me, so the chapter didn't feel especially groundbreaking.

What I found useful in this chapter was how the authors broke adaptive facilitation down into four concrete skill sets: emotional intelligence, cultural humility, clear communication, and reflection. Naming these separately makes the "common sense" of reading a room into something more actionable and diagnosable — I can look at a moment that went sideways and ask specifically which of these four I was strong or weak in, rather than just labeling it a vague "facilitation" failure. Cultural humility stood out in particular, since it pushes adaptive facilitation beyond just managing energy or time and toward actively naming and correcting bias in the moment (as in the example where a facilitator owns a culturally biased handout rather than defending it) — that's a more specific lens than I'd normally bring to "adjusting on the fly," and one I want to build into how I self-assess after leading PD.

Bringing It All Together

Taken together, these seven habits gave me something I didn't fully have before: a shared vocabulary and a structure for the two questions I started with — how to build a genuine culture of professional learning, and how to actually measure its impact. Purpose, emotion, power, adult learning, intentional design, details, and adaptive facilitation aren't seven separate checkboxes; they build on each other, from why we're doing PD at all down to how we recover when a session doesn't go as planned. Some chapters challenged me more than others, and a few felt like validation of things I already do well rather than new discoveries — but that's useful too, since it tells me where to lean on existing strengths and where I genuinely need to grow as I step into this role.

The real test now is putting this into practice: taking the Five Whys into Staff Orientation, building out a way to actually track impact using Guskey's framework, and staying honest with myself about which of these habits I'm strong in versus which ones I still need to build. I'd recommend this book to anyone stepping into a PD role — and I'll check back in later this year to see how the theory held up against the reality of running PD at my own school.