The best professional growth I ever experienced didn’t come from a district-mandated workshop. It came from a question I couldn’t stop asking myself.

Early in my administrator role, I learned that filling the PD calendar for my teachers and support staff didn’t necessarily lead to improvements. The question I couldn’t shake was, what do I need to do differently?

That question — and what I chose to do with it — was about scholarly agency. How do I help my staff decide what they need to learn? How do I make it actionable, and how do we evaluate its impact?

That’s it. Yet, it’s rarer in schools than you’d think.

Most professional development in schools is done TO educators, not BY them. Someone schedules it. Someone decides the topic. You show up. You sit. You leave. Scholarly agency flips that. It means you take the wheel. When you have agency over your own learning, you:

This isn’t self-help talk. It’s how lasting professional growth actually happens.

Here’s something I’ve believed for a long time: a packed professional development schedule is not the same as a learning culture.

You can run 30 hours of training in a year and still have a staff that doesn’t grow. Why? Because mandated learning rarely sticks the way chosen learning does. When you own your growth, you care about the outcome.

You bring what you learned back to your classroom or office. You try things. You talk about what you’re reading. You stay curious not because someone told you to, but because you genuinely want to be better at what you do.

That curiosity is contagious. When your staff sees you learning out loud — leading a workshop, sharing an article, naming a mistake you made and what you did about it, or asking questions in a staff meeting, they start to do the same. That’s how a culture of learning actually gets built. Not from a policy. From people.

If you’re a principal, coach, professor, or superintendent, your job isn’t just to make sure PD happens. It’s to create conditions where your people WANT to grow.
That means giving them:

The leaders I’ve seen build the strongest teams aren’t the ones who control every professional learning moment. They’re the ones who get out of the way strategically and trust their people to drive.

Your staff will rise to the level of ownership you invite them to take on. If you treat them like recipients, they’ll act like recipients. If you treat them like scholars, they’ll act like scholars.

Here's the question and a task I want you to sit with this week: When was the last time YOU chose something to learn — not because it was assigned, but because you genuinely needed to grow?

Give Your Team a Protected Learning Choice. At your next staff meeting or planning session, set aside even 20 minutes for each person to share something they’re learning, reading, or trying on their own. Keep it low-stakes and lead by going first. You’re not just creating space—you’re sending a clear message here.

Please feel free to share in the comments. I will respond.

Resources for educators who build, lead, and grow.

Mastering the Art of Edupreneurship — A deep dive into the mindset and strategies of successful educational entrepreneurs. Worth bookmarking.

Resources for educators who build, lead, and grow.

Mastering the Art of Edupreneurship — A deep dive into the mindset and strategies of successful educational entrepreneurs. Worth bookmarking.

If this issue resonated with you, Chapter 7 of Thought Leadership in Education: A Comprehensive Exploration of Transformative Educational Ideas goes deeper into the scholarly agency framework and its application in systems. [Grab it here]

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