Putting Equity Into Practice: Equity-Minded Professional Learning

Designers and facilitators of educator professional learning should model exemplary strategies so that faculty will in turn engage equitably with students. This means ensuring that professional learning fosters belonging, centers equity, leverages strengths of participants, and explicitly seeks to cultivate and sustain cultural ways of knowing and being for diverse learners to be inclusive of students and faculty.

By definition, professional learning is the creation of learning experiences that build cultural competence and support faculty through facilitated engagements and communities of practice. Including cultural competency and communities of practice distinguishes professional learning from professional development which is often a one-off event that does not necessarily involve application and evaluation of the topic presented. What designers and facilitators do to support faculty informs their work with students. Through professional learning, faculty can develop their capacity to be change agents both inside and outside of the classroom. Achieving the Dream and Every Learner Everywhere have articulated a set of Good Practice Principles that guide the design and facilitation of high-impact professional learning (Bass, et al., 2019; Eynon & Iuzzini, 2020). This guide expands on those resources and clarifies what it means to create opportunities for professional learning that are explicitly equity-minded.

Watch a webinar on the resource featuring professional learning specialists who share what they have learned in their many years of working with faculty.