A starter outline for your next staff PD session

The question I get asked most often by digital learning leaders is some version of this. "I have ninety minutes with the staff next term. The principal wants something on AI. The leadership team wants something on workflows. The early career teachers want something practical. I have one slot. What do I do?"

The honest answer is that ninety minutes can do one thing, well. The real question is which one. The PD session planner we put online is meant to help with that.

What the planner does

Four short inputs. The size of your audience. The time you have, from sixty minutes through to a two-session series. The topic, picked from five options that map to the work most schools are actually doing right now: AI for teaching tasks, AI for admin reduction, AI literacy and policy, digital workflows, and implementation and change. The experience level of your audience: mostly beginners, mixed, or mostly experienced.

You also tick the role mix in the room. All teaching staff, heads of department, leadership, support and admin, newly graduated teachers, IT. Some of those choices unlock targeted appendices.

The output is a structured outline. Not a script. An outline that names the welcome, the framing anchor, the core activity, the closing share-back, and the commitment that closes the session. Each row tells you what happens, why it matters, and what materials you need.

Why the outline looks the way it does

Four constraints, sitting underneath every outline the planner produces.

Hands-on over lecture. Staff get more from twenty minutes of working on a real artefact than from sixty minutes of slides. Every outline is built around an activity that touches their actual classroom or admin work, not a hypothetical case.

Specific over generic. Generic AI training does not survive contact with a Year 9 classroom on a wet Wednesday. The activities ask staff to bring something specific. An upcoming lesson. A real workflow. A concrete admin task. The work in the room is the work back at the desk.

Anchored in real staff work. Each outline opens with a short reset on what is actually new and useful, not a "future of work" framing. Staff are tired of being told the future is here. They want to know what to do this fortnight.

Designed for adoption, not novelty. The closing of every session asks each participant to name one specific thing they will do differently before the next staff meeting. Spoken out loud, in front of peers, written down on a shared sheet. That is the difference between a session people enjoyed and a session that changed practice.

The bits the planner gets right that most PD slides don't

Pairing logic. The planner pairs participants deliberately depending on the experience mix. If the room is mixed, it pairs a confident user with someone less confident, with the confident user driving the tool and the less confident user driving the pedagogy. If the room is mostly beginners, the activity slows to one section of one lesson, not a whole unit. If the room is mostly experienced, the activity asks participants to compare two AI tools on the same task and report which broke down faster.

Breaks. Real breaks. Coffee, conversation, no slides. The full-day outline has two breaks plus a longer working block. Adult learners need recovery time. Skipping the break to fit more content lowers retention, not raises it. We name this explicitly because most school PD ignores it.

The between-session task. If you pick a two-session series, the outline includes a structured between-session task. Each participant leaves with a specific thing to try once between this session and the next. Not "have a go". A specific thing, with a specific outcome, that can be reported back. The between-session task is the load-bearing piece of any series. Without it, session two is session one with extra coffee.

Appendices for early career teachers and the leadership team. If you tick those role mixes, the outline adds two short appendices. The first names what early career teachers should know, in language that reaches them where they are. The second names what the leadership team needs to decide before staff leave the room. That is the part where most PD sessions quietly fail. People agree something needs to change. Nobody owns it. Term life resumes.

What you do with the outline

Print it. Edit it. Cross out the bits that don't fit your school. Add the bits that do. Treat it as a starting point for the conversation you would have with a thoughtful colleague, not a script.

If the outline names a working block but you only have forty minutes, cut the working block in half rather than cutting the share-back. If it names a printed handout but your school is paperless, replace it with a shared doc. If it asks for whiteboard markers in two colours and your whiteboard markers all died last term, write the proposed steps on butcher's paper. The structure matters more than the materials.

The planner is at digitalattitudes.com.au/tools/pd-session-planner. Free, no sign-in. Copy the outline, download it as plain text, or just read it on the screen and decide what to keep.

If the result is the outline you would have written on a Saturday morning anyway, you have saved yourself the Saturday morning.