Most of the time, when we design professional development or training, we design it for people. We study the context, identify the need, build the thing, and show up ready to deliver. The learners arrive, sit down, and receive what we have prepared. Even when the design is thoughtful and the content is relevant, this arrangement carries an assumption that often goes unexamined: that the designer knows what the experience should be before the people in the room have any say in it.

I did not start thinking seriously about co-design because I read about it. I started thinking about it because I ran a training that made the limits of the traditional approach painfully visible.

What Happened in the Room

A few years ago, I was asked to facilitate a series of five professional learning community sessions at a rural school on a tribal nation in South Dakota. The PLC initiative was a carry-over from a previous administration, and by the time I arrived, the enthusiasm that may have once existed had long since faded. The principal was skeptical. The teachers were resistant. And the reasons were not hard to understand once I spent a little time listening.

Many of the educators in that building were teaching as singletons, the only person covering their subject area in the entire school. The PLC frameworks I had prepared, the ones drawn from national texts and conference presentations, assumed a context where multiple teachers share a content area, observe each other’s practice, and collaborate on common assessments. That assumption did not survive first contact with this particular building. The model I brought was designed for a reality that did not match the one these teachers were living in.

The first session did not go well. Not in a dramatic way, but in the quieter way where you can feel the room disengaging because what you are offering does not connect to what they actually need. The polite nods were there. The participation was not.

The Shift

After that first session, I did something I should have done before I ever walked through the door: I asked. I sent surveys to the staff. I talked with the administrator about what was realistic given their structure and their history with this initiative. I tried to understand what PLC work could look like in a building where the standard model did not fit, rather than insisting that the standard model was what they needed to adopt.

Over the remaining sessions, the training changed. It became less about implementing a framework and more about figuring out, together, what collaborative professional learning could mean in their specific context. I cannot claim we arrived at full co-design. The power dynamics were still present. I was still the outside facilitator with an agenda and a contract. But the distance between what I had planned and what we actually did grew wider with each session, and the work got better because of it.

By the fifth session, the room felt different. Not transformed, not revolutionized, but different. The educators were engaging with questions that mattered to them rather than responding to questions I had predetermined. That shift, from compliance to genuine participation, was small in scale but significant in what it taught me about how learning experiences should be built.

What Co-Design Actually Asks of Us

Co-design means involving the people who will experience the learning in the process of creating it. Not as an afterthought, not as a feedback loop bolted onto the end, but as a structural commitment from the beginning. It means treating learners and practitioners as partners who have knowledge the designer does not.

This is not a new idea. Paulo Freire argued decades ago that education becomes a practice of freedom only when learners move from being passive recipients to active participants in shaping their own learning. What Freire described at the philosophical level, co-design operationalizes at the practical level. It asks: who decided what this learning experience would be, and did the people most affected by that decision have a voice in making it?

The honest answer, in most training and professional development contexts, is no. And the reasons are understandable. Co-design is slower. It is messier. It requires the designer to hold their plans loosely and be willing to change direction based on what they hear. It also requires a kind of vulnerability that most professional contexts do not reward, because admitting that you do not yet know what the experience should look like can feel like admitting you are not prepared.

What I have found, though, is that the alternative carries its own costs. When we design for people without designing with them, we end up building experiences that reflect our understanding of the context rather than the context itself. That gap between what we assume and what is actually true is where resistance lives. The teachers in that rural school were not resistant to learning or to improving their practice. They were resistant to a framework that did not account for who they were and how they worked.

The Hard Part

It would be easy to turn this into a clean narrative where I learned the lesson, adopted co-design as a practice, and never made the same mistake again. That is not what happened. The reality is that most of the work I do still involves designing experiences before the learners are in the room. Timelines, contracts, institutional expectations, and the practical logistics of serving multiple districts across a large geographic region all push toward a model where the designer shows up with a plan.

Co-design, for me, remains more aspirational than routine. It is a direction I try to move toward rather than a destination I have reached. What that PLC experience taught me was not a method but a posture: that the most important information about what a learning experience should be often lives with the people who will be in it, and that accessing that information requires giving up some control over the design.

This is where co-design intersects with something deeper than methodology. Sharing power in the design process means genuinely valuing what other people know about their own needs, their own constraints, and their own contexts. It means being willing to hear that the thing you built is not the thing they needed, and responding to that information by changing the design rather than trying harder to sell it.

Where This Leaves Me

I still think about those five sessions. The gap between where I started and where we ended up was not enormous, but it was real. The experience did not convert me into a co-design purist. What it did was make me permanently uncomfortable with the assumption that I know what a learning experience should be before I have spent time with the people it is for.

That discomfort is, I think, productive. It shows up now in smaller ways: in the surveys I send before a workshop, in the flexibility I try to build into session plans, in the conversations I have with administrators about what their staff actually needs rather than what the contract says I am there to deliver. None of that is full co-design. But all of it moves in a direction where the people in the room have more influence over what happens there.

If you are designing learning experiences, professional development, training, courses, or anything that asks people to learn and grow, it is worth asking how much of the design reflects what you think the learners need versus what they have told you they need. The answer is usually humbling. And that humility, more than any framework or methodology, is where better design starts.

If you want to talk through what co-design could look like in your context, or if you have your own stories about learning to share power in the design process, I would like to hear from you. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there is more on learning design and educational technology at bradylicht.com.

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