Your PD Cult of Personality
There are a lot of formats for PD for educators out there -- whether informal educators or classroom teachers. From webinars to discussion forums. You name it, someone has made it into a learning resource.
But whatever the modality, a frequent phenomenon we see is people putting PD resources out in the universe and feeling like the response is... crickets.
Teaching into the Void
This is one of the toughest conundrums for the creators of PD resources and communities. How do you interpret radio silence? Does it mean our resources were terrible? Do they just hate us now? Did we pick a bad time? Did they get eaten by swamp monsters?
This is not a case of perfectionist educators freaking out when they don't get 100% engagement. You've invested time, energy, and expertise to create and offer professional resources – written, virtual, or in-person. It is tough to feel like you're teaching into the void.
(Full disclosure: “screaming into the void” was how I described this newsletter, before people started replying regularly.)
Because it matters to know if the resources you create are adding any value. But that can be really hard with any PD, especially if you're delivering it asynchronously or through a broad, distributed network.
PD Use: It's Complicated
As evaluators, there are a bunch of things we can look at to try and understand engagement in a distributed PD network:
- Awareness of what's available
- Interest in what's available
- Perceived usefulness or relevance
- Intention to use in the future
- Reported use in the past
- Actual use in the past (behavior > self-report)
These measures give you good insights! But they also have limitations.
The biggest limitation is that Use, Interest, and Usefulness are three very different things! When we talk to educators about their professional development, it is never a simple equation of:
Interesting to Me
+ Relevant to My Professional Context
= I Will Attend and Learn
Nor is it the inverse!
When someone is not participating in PD, it rarely means they think it's all useless and dull.
A lot of the time, “I don’t use it” is utterly disconnected to interest or utility. It’s a function of time or energy. Or: "My New Year's Resolution was to say No." Or one of many other things.
In fact, here are other factors we've seen at play when educators talk about using and not using PD resources:
- Attachment to the other people in the network
- Attachment to the facilitator of the network
- Value received from past involvement with the host
- Degree of commitment required
- Level of stress in their life
- One specific stress in their life
- Time zone
- Guilt
And more.
It’s complicated.
And because the vast majority of educators in an opt-in PD Network are some hard-core lifelong learners. These people are dedicated to their craft, eager to learn, hold bottomless curiosity, and have the absolute best of intentions.
Which means: their PD eyes are usually bigger than their PD stomachs.
When we ask about interest, relevance, and commitment individually, they tell us that everything sounds useful and compelling and worthwhile. But when it comes time to carve out 2 hours on calendar? Well, reality steps in.
So, how do we measure this messy mix of behavior, feelings, and external factors in a simple survey format? We needed to get creative.
PD Personality: Playful Truth-Telling
From years of looking at engagement with different types of PD, one of my biggest takeaways is that different professional learners are looking for different ways to connect and learn.
For program managers, who need to create PD systems that work for most people, the challenge is generating some cross-cutting insights about those individual preferences. You need a way to respect the complexity, but have enough clarity to make decisions.
As our evaluation team came up against this challenge, we needed a way to help us understand people's relationship with their PD experience.
That's when we came up with a Buzzfeed-style PD Personality Quiz.
You know, like, "Which Hogwarts House would you end up in?"
We didn't create an entire personality quiz. Instead, we created a list of 8 PD Personality Types we could imagine being on the "results page" of such a quiz. Each had a fun label and basic description of its qualities, tailored to what we knew about the PD network we were studying.
The descriptions pulled in different factors that we knew were at play -- including motivations, priorities, external factors, and feelings about your behavior. Instead of dealing with each one in isolation, we tied them all together.
Critically, each respondent could only pick one "personality."
This was torture for some. But, like a Buzzfeed Quiz, you can't end up in both Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. We need to see where you lean more.
Did Personality Profiles Help?
We adapted this technique with two national PD programs last year, customizing their personality profiles for each, based on what we know from prior work with their members.
Look, I would never rely on a Buzzfeed Quiz to make decisions. But this question added a splash of personality to the data, which made other results come to life.
Findings from traditional survey questions could feel very same-y and bland. What I loved about adding this question, is we got a sense of how people are behaving and how they are feeling about those choices together.
It also forced our respondents to self-reflect in a different way. When they had to pick just one category, they had to spend a few minutes thinking about whether they were more Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff (so to speak -- no copyright was infringed in our question). That made the open-ended response we received in the next question filled with even more useful insights about their relationship to PD.
The results gave us some real insights into how people viewed their relationship with PD and the Network. It was especially helpful when we crossed their PD Personality with other data. We could start to see how members saw themselves as part of -- or separate from -- the larger Network.
Real World Example:
Knowing how much program managers struggled to understand the "radio silence" they saw among some members, we had a few different profiles to capture the complexity here.
One useful category for both programs was the small segment of Drifted Networkers.
This captured those who had "drifted away" from engaging with offered resources and the community. They were no longer even "lurking" to keep tabs on things. It's not a time issue; they just... aren't engaging. At the same time, Drifted Networkers also felt an underlying wish to re-connect. (Acting on that wish is a whole different story.)
By exploring the data, we noticed that Drifted Networkers tended to be folks who had progressed in their professional role in some way. Meaning: they still had fond feelings toward the PD network, they still liked the idea of connecting, but they didn't need the same "basic" content that is PD bread-and-butter for getting newbies up to speed.
This gave PD managers ideas of different opportunities they could offer that might create compelling paths for Drifted Networkers to reconnect:
- New PD centered on leadership
- Routes to mentorship or expertise-sharers
- Super low-ask ways to reaffirm shared identity and connection, even if none of the PD is ever relevant again
- Strategies to maximize connection and minimize "guilt" of being not involved enough (which can lead to total avoidance) (PS: Human emotional pathways are weird.)
Each program has to decide whether any of the ideas are worth pursuing and/or making peace with the fact that Drifting is a normal course of events. But, as they say, knowing is half the battle.
Which PD personality are you as we start 2026? Signing up for everything? Overwhelmed and learning to say "no"? Guilt-ridden avoider who regrets subscribing to too many newsletters last year? Tell me yours, and I'll tell you mine.