Practical and Paced: How Principals Like Their PD Served Up

The principalship has become one of the most complex and demanding roles in education. The hours are long, and the responsibilities are endless: managing student behavior, coaching teachers, and keeping schools safe. Even as the role has expanded, many principals say their skills haven’t kept up with the evolving demands of their jobs.

And it’s not just new principals who need to master these skills.

“It’s easy to assume that someone with more experience may need less professional development, when, in reality, it may be much more, because the job has evolved and changed over time,” said Jon Minton, the principal of Elizabethton High School in eastern Tennessee.

Yet professional development opportunities are often limited, inaccessible, or disconnected from daily realities, frequently tied to conferences that principals lack the time or funding to attend. Like teachers, principals don’t want “one-and-done” sessions without follow-up, nor do they want generic training that fails to reflect current demands on their jobs.

In an EdWeek Research Center survey of 876 educators conducted online from Feb. 12 to March 17, about one third of respondents said the PD they received in the past year was very or somewhat irrelevant to their job. Many cited a lack of follow-up as a reason, and many said it was unrelated to the real challenges they face.

Principals say effective PD must be well-paced, give them time to experiment with new ideas in their school, and group them with peers who are working through similar challenges. When Minton saw the number of in-person PD opportunities dwindle after the pandemic, he created his own platform—a podcast—to address areas in which principals want to build their skills.

When faced with new developments, like the use of artificial intelligence to do schoolwork, principals often have to piece together answers by diving into district policies, asking colleagues, and searching online.

“It would be great to have a toolbox that we can go to on a minute’s notice and access to deal with staff or student emergencies,” said David Wiedlich, the principal of Radnor Middle School in Radnor, Pa., who’s been trying to build up his skills in trauma-informed leadership. When a colleague passed away last year, Wiedlich struggled to find the right words to address his staff and students. “Emergencies aren’t common or expected, but it would have helped to know how to talk to people after a crisis,” he added.

Meeting principals’ PD needs can be challenging, experts say. Principals are tied to their buildings and cannot easily step away for extended training, and their needs vary widely by experience and context. Some may need support with classroom observations, while others may need help guiding teachers in the use of instructional strategies for a particular group of students.

Engaging and useful PD for principals must be a mix of in-person coaching and conversations, self-reflection, and experimentation. Here are a few ways experts say districts can make that happen.

Choose the right venue

Principals are always in a time crunch, often working 50-60 hours a week and taking work home. Professional development for principals has to be a mix of in-person sessions, virtual meetings, and pre-recorded content, say experts.

Different types of learning should happen at different venues, said Jasmine Kullar, the chief school leadership officer at Cobb County schools in Georgia.

“When you pull principals out of buildings, be intentional about the purpose,” Kullar said.

Compliance-related training, such as information on new laws or district policies, can be handled online. When principals need to dig into a new instructional strategy or discuss a complex challenge like improving teacher morale, in-person PD, with a coach or peers, is more suitable.

A handful of principals in the same area and at similar schools in the Cobb County district meet once a month to discuss challenges and learn from each other. Principals in these learning groups also visit their colleagues’ schools to observe each other.

Different venues for different types of PD can help principals compartmentalize their time and be prepared to engage, Kullar said. Districts should not mix the different kinds of training that principals need: a 20-minute leadership session at the end of a long day of compliance training won’t work, she added.

Principals learn best from each other

Like teachers, principals find their best teachers are often their peers, who’ve tackled similar challenges. The principal cohorts in Cobb County pick topics like how to empower and coach their assistant principals.

This kind of peer learning should be baked into formal PD opportunities, said Joe Schroeder, the associate executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School Administrators. Principals table ideas they want to experiment with—like introducing a new teaching strategy or a creative use of school data—and get ideas from their peers on implementation, following up later to share results and troubleshoot challenges.

Principals love to workshop a challenge, said Ashley Wardlaw, the principal of Blue Ridge High School in Greenville County, S.C.

“My building is different from the school that’s 20 minutes away. I can bounce ideas off another principal and say, ‘Hey, this is my roadblock. Help me see things differently,’” Wardlaw said.

Principals need time to reflect

For PD to be effective, it needs to be sustained and thoughtfully paced, allowing principals time to apply and refine new strategies. In Wisconsin, Schroeder has created multi-day academies aimed at principals of all experience levels, structured around a “plan, do, study, act” cycle that lasts through the year.

Learning opportunities for principals need to be frequent but interspersed, so leaders have time to work on their challenges, collect data, and reflect on the effects on students and staff, Schroeder said.

Bringing these data back to the cohort also keeps principals accountable to the problem they set out to solve, in contrast to the dominant “one-and-done” PD model, which is ineffective in creating any lasting change in schools, Schroeder added.

The pacing can be hard to get right, especially when principals can’t spend too many days away from their schools. The time commitment to meet a few times a year can be a challenge, Schroeder said, but worth it if principals get real-time, clear, and applicable solutions to their problems.

“The job is designed to pay attention to the urgent,” he said. “We have to turn their attention from the urgent to the impactful. That’s what moves the needle for students.”