PD
Professional Development, activities to enhance knowledge and skills related to one’s work, particularly in teacher education.
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The “Other” Training and Delivery Modalities
When it’s time to teach something or share information, most people default to building a presentation. It’s familiar, it’s comfortable, and it works often enough that the habit sticks. But comfortable isn’t…
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Outdoor PD for Educator Wellness and Innovation
Working with educational systems across the Great Plains, I keep running into the same pattern: the way we usually do professional development doesn’t touch the problems educators are actually carrying. Here in…
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Biomimicry in Learning: Coyotes & Adaptive Funding Strategies
This piece has been folded into Biomimicry as a Lens: Coyotes, Pine Cones, and Prairie Grass, which consolidates the four-part series into one essay. The coyote section is there.
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You Should Offer PD as a Gift
Revised September 2026. The original version of this piece started from Robin Wall Kimmerer and ended up making a business case, treating free help as relationship capital that turns into contracts. That’s…
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Action, Information, Rest: Cycles of Design
I keep returning to a single line from Ursula K. Le Guin that has quietly shaped how I approach both learning design and my own professional development: “When action grows unprofitable, gather…
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Keynote at the Black Hills Library Mini-Conference
A keynote at the Black Hills Library Mini-Conference that introduced rural and small-town librarians to generative AI through a four-part structure built around a “human in the loop” ethical framework, interactive demonstrations,…
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Let “EdTech” Training Die
The shift in educational technology culture became clear to me through our annual edtech conference here in South Dakota. To my eye, attendance has thinned over the past few years, and the…
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Homegrown Learning Book (Preview)
Working as a learning designer across the Great Plains, I’ve found that conventional instructional design approaches often wither when they’re transplanted into rural and otherwise unusual contexts. That’s what started Homegrown Learning:…
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Google Sheets Efficiency for Administrative Assistants: Mixed Skill Levels, Applications, and Collaboration
A 90-minute Google Sheets session for Douglas School District administrative staff that used a colored-sticker skill check-in and mixed-expertise grouping to make a single session work across a wide range of comfort…
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Pivot: The Learning Design Strategy Game (Preview)
What is Pivot? In fall 2024, I made Pivot, a strategy card game about learning design. Players hold a hand of design principle cards and use them to build a solution to…
