I've Trained the Teachers...Now What?!
/One of the most common and most frustrating questions I often hear from leaders is: Why aren’t my teachers doing what they've been trained to do?
You invest time and money into professional development.
✔️Teachers attend the training.
✔️They nod along.
✔️They even say it was “good.”
And then… nothing changes.
At first glance, it’s easy to assume the issue is motivation, buy-in, or follow-through. But in most cases, the real issue is much simpler (and harder to accept):
Training alone is not enough.
Research consistently shows that only about 10% of what is learned in training actually transfers into practice. That means if your professional development plan begins and ends with a workshop, the odds are already stacked against you. Not because your teachers don’t care, but because learning doesn’t automatically equal implementation.
Here’s where many programs get stuck:
We plan the training, but we don’t plan for what happens before or after the training.
Before the training, teachers often don’t know:
Why this topic matters right now,
What problem it’s supposed to solve, and
How it connects to their daily realities.
So they attend as participants, not as implementers.
After the training, teachers are usually expected to:
“Try it out,”
“Use the strategies,” and
“Apply what they learned”.
But without a clear plan, those expectations are at best vague. There’s no shared definition of what implementation actually looks like, no protected time to practice, and no follow-up system. The responsibility to translate ideas into action quietly falls on individual teachers, many of whom are already overwhelmed.
That’s not a capacity issue.
That’s a systems issue.
When leaders say, “We trained them on this already,” they often mean, “We exposed them to the information.” But exposure is not the same thing as integration. Real change requires intention, structure, and support.
If you don’t have an implementation plan before the training, you’re relying on hope after it ends.
🤞🏽Hope that teachers remember.
🤞🏽Hope that they know where to start.
🤞🏽Hope that they feel confident enough to try.
🤞🏽Hope that it sticks.
And hope is not a strategy.
This is why professional development feels so repetitive in many programs. The same topics get revisited year after year, not because teachers aren’t learning, but because the learning was never embedded into daily practice in a meaningful way.
When you start looking at PD through this lens, the question shifts.
It’s no longer: “Why aren’t my teachers doing what they were trained to do?”
It becomes: “What systems do we have—or not have—that support teachers in turning learning into practice?”
That shift changes everything.
If you’re ready to stop doing “more PD” and start building systems that support real practice, the Winning Beyond the Workshop Ultimate PD Toolkit is a great next step.