How to Plan a Yearlong PD Calendar as an Instructional Coach

It seems as though many coaches have now settled into the school year and things have been a little all over the place. Being an instructional coach can begin to feel overwhelming. There is so much to do! It’s easy to get bogged down in stress to the point that nothing gets done. One of the things I struggled with the most as a coach was creating a PD Calendar with topics that would support the school’s goals. If you are lost as to where to start, here are the six simple steps I use.

None of them is complicated. The work is in doing them in order, because each step hands the next one the information it needs, and skipping ahead is how a calendar ends up as a list of unrelated topics nobody remembers by March.

What is a PD calendar and what goes into it?

A PD calendar is the yearlong map of professional development for your building: the session titles, the dates, the order, and the follow-up, all tied to the school’s goals. A good one is built from four sources of information, and I gather them before I write a single session title.

The first source is schoolwide data. Assess the school’s needs by reviewing the data you already have:

• Discipline data
• Process data, such as how routines and systems are running
• Snapshot notes from short, focused, non-evaluative classroom visits
• Testing data

The second source is your principal. The principal is the visionary and the leader of the ship, and the coach is the support anchor who helps hold things together for teachers and administrators. Meet with your administrator to talk through the school’s mission, vision, and core values, and make sure you’re on the same page about where the school stands. I suggest a team mentality: you and the principal do monthly Snapshots together, review schoolwide data together, and talk about what teachers need. Those shared visits become the strategic plan and the annual, measurable goals for professional development. If your school has named a Priority Anchor, the calendar is built around it.

The third source is the faculty. Early in the year, email an open-ended questionnaire asking teachers which PD topics they want to focus on. Districts and states are often pushing initiatives teachers feel ill-equipped to carry out, so ask them about their biggest struggle, and read every answer.

The fourth source is backward design. Once the goals are clear, summarize the key strategies you’ll teach and answer two questions for each one: What should teachers be able to do when the training ends? What evidence will show that a teacher has implemented the strategy? The answers tell you how to introduce each strategy and what to title each session.

Why a PD calendar changes what happens in classrooms

A single PD session, however strong, rarely changes practice. A calendar does, because it builds in the follow-up. In my role as a building coach, I was required to deliver biweekly professional development sessions to all classroom teachers. Since I knew I would deliver biweekly, I mapped out my topics at the beginning of the school year based on the school’s initiatives. Once I had determined the titles of sessions, I mapped those out on the calendar. I considered roadblocks that might occur and tried to make sure that there were sessions built in for reflection and implementation struggles. I also included work sessions with teachers on specific topics. I follow this model with all initiatives that need to be introduced and supported. Then I strategically place those on the calendar according to their importance, along with a good time to start a series of professional development sessions. (You don’t want to start a new set of sessions during state testing; teachers will not be engaged.)

The timing of your sessions also shapes the calendar. Before you place anything, answer three questions. What time of day will I present: regular school hours, teacher planning time, or grade-level and content meetings? Is the PD mandatory or voluntary? Will all teachers attend? A calendar for after-school voluntary sessions looks very different from one for required planning-time sessions, and knowing which one you’re building saves you from rewriting it in October.

How do you build a PD calendar for the year?

After my calendar is developed, I share it with my administrators. Everyone on the team must understand that the calendar I create at the beginning of the year is a working document, meaning it can change at any time. There will be times when you need to push a session back, add a session on a different topic, and so forth. Think of this as your curriculum map to ensure that students master a foundational skill before we can move on. The same happens when developing a professional development calendar. Each month, choose topics along a continuum, with enough sessions to front-load the information and then follow up with actionable implementation support. If you’re a beginner, you don’t need detailed session descriptions right away. Plug the topics into a calendar template or Google Calendar and add the detail as the year unfolds. The six steps below are the order I work in, and the download gives you the template and the questions for each step.

Start with the map, then fill in the detail

The calendar you share in September will not be the calendar you finish in May, and that’s fine. What the map gives you is a reason for every session and a place for the follow-up, so teachers see one coherent year of learning in place of a string of disconnected Tuesdays.