What Your PD Calendar Says Before You Say a Word

By: Anthony President

Every August, I watch school leaders build their professional development calendar the same way: line by line, session by session, working backward from whatever the state or the district or the new curriculum requires. It is careful work. It has to be. There are compliance hours to log, new standards to introduce, safety protocols to refresh. By the time the calendar is full, it usually looks complete.

I sat with a director of curriculum a few weeks ago while she walked me through hers. Six sessions. Data protocols, the new reading program, a mandatory Title IX refresher, classroom management for the incoming cohort of first-year teachers, two half-days for grade-level planning. Every line was necessary. Nothing on it was wrong.

Then she paused, looked at the list again, and said something that has stayed with me since. "There's nothing on here about the people. Just what they're supposed to do."

She was not wrong, and she was not alone. That gap is not a leadership failure. It is what happens when a PD calendar gets built entirely around compliance and instruction, which is where most of the pressure to build it comes from in the first place. But the gap still has a cost, and that cost starts showing up faster than most calendars account for.

The Reality Behind the Reality

The data on educator stress has stopped being a surprising headline and started being background noise, which is its own kind of warning sign. Pew Research Center found that 77 percent of public K-12 teachers describe their job as frequently stressful, and 68 percent say it is overwhelming. Gallup's research on workplace burnout found that 52 percent of teachers report feeling burned out "always" or "very often," a rate that outpaces every other industry Gallup tracks by nearly 20 percent. The National Education Association's 2022 survey found that 90 percent of teachers consider burnout a serious problem in the profession today.

I think about a veteran fifth-grade teacher I worked with a few years ago, twelve years into her career and good at it, the kind of teacher a principal builds a schedule around. By late September she had quietly stopped eating lunch most days, using the thirty minutes to grade instead, and had started keeping a bag of candy in her desk drawer for the afternoon crash that came from skipping the meal. None of this looked like a crisis. It looked like dedication. Her principal did not find out until she mentioned it, almost as a joke, in a hallway conversation in November. By then it had been her routine for two months.

That is the part the statistics do not capture on their own. The pressure does not announce itself in October. It takes shape inside the first 30 days, the same 30 days that set the tone for classroom routines and staff communication, because that is also when a teacher's coping patterns for the entire year quietly get set. Whatever gets reached for when the first hard week hits, whether that is skipping lunch to finish grading, a second cup of coffee instead of a real break, or simply pushing through without naming that anything is wrong, tends to become the default. By November, it is not a choice anymore. It is just how things are done.

A PD calendar that never mentions any of this is simply reflecting a familiar truth: sustainability rarely gets treated as something that needs to be planned for, the same way instruction does. It gets treated as something people should already know how to handle on their own.

What the Calendar Actually Communicates

Staff read a PD calendar the same way they read a staff meeting agenda or a first-day welcome speech. They read it for what it signals, not just what it schedules. When every session is about what they need to deliver and none of it is about what they need to sustain themselves, the message lands whether or not it was intended: this part is yours to figure out.

That is the same principle behind the routines and communication rhythms worth building in the first 30 days of a school year. What leadership prioritizes early gets read as what leadership actually values, all year long. A calendar is simply the most literal version of that signal, because it is written down and shared before the year even starts.

The good news is that this is fixable in exactly the way a calendar is always fixable. It just requires treating staff sustainability as its own line item rather than something that happens if there is time left over.

What This Can Look Like in Practice

None of this requires overhauling an entire PD calendar. It takes one deliberate line on it.

Next week, I am leading a session called "What We Reach For," built around a simple, honest question: what do we actually reach for when the days get long and the stress compounds, and is it working for us or quietly costing us? The session walks educators through their own coping patterns without judgment, then helps them build the beginning of a wellness plan around what genuinely supports them, not just what is available in the moment. It is a single session, sized to fit inside a calendar that already feels full, and that is the point. Sustainability just needs a seat at the table the calendar is already being built around.

That session next week is part of a larger event worth knowing about if this resonates with your team. Restore & Rise: Educator Wellness Summit is a one-day, in-person gathering for K-12 educators and youth-serving professionals, held August 4th in Toledo, Ohio, combining culturally responsive and trauma-informed practice with restorative wellness work. It is a good option for a school that wants to see this kind of work modeled firsthand, or for sending a few staff members before deciding what a fuller version could look like inside your own building. You can learn more about the summit here: Restore & Rise: Educator Wellness Summit.

Not every school is ready to send a team to Toledo this August, and that is fine. If you are building your own calendar for the year ahead, that seat does not have to look like a full session right away. It can start smaller. A protected lunch built into one PD day. A five-minute check-in at a staff meeting where the question is simply how people are doing, not what they still owe. A single afternoon set aside before the year gets loud, with no agenda item attached to it other than rest. The size of the gesture matters less than whether it exists at all.

If you are further along and already know you want this built specifically around your staff, your calendar, and your budget rather than a public event, that is exactly the kind of conversation a Quick Win Consult is for. Fifteen minutes is usually enough to figure out where the one line belongs on your calendar and what it should look like once it is there.

The teachers walking into your building this August are already deciding, somewhere below the surface, what they are going to reach for to get through the year. The only real question is whether anything on your calendar had a hand in that decision, or whether it was left entirely up to them.

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Master Trainer, International Speaker and author of the book “Invincible Social Worker”, Anthony President has empowered and inspired more than 100,000 professionals to perform, produce and partner better at their places of work.  Thousands of companies and organizations have been transformed as a result of Anthony’s work.  

As Founder and CEO of Presidential Consultants, LLC, Anthony leads a team of more than two dozen experienced learning development and coaching professionals who together serve more than 16,000 helping professionals each year in the areas of leadership, inclusion, and workplace wellness. As a thought leader in the field, Anthony continues to research, innovate, and drive positive change in the realm of professional development and organizational transformation.

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