The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Manager, Voice of the Customer, Hayley Browning.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
The Power of Personalized Professional Learning with Stephanie Lawkins
In today's episode, Stephanie Lawkins, Vice President of Educator Success at Curriculum Associates, joins to share how rethinking professional learning (PL) to create a more personalized approach creates a much stronger outcome and experience for educators. Instead of long, generic sessions, we explore how role-aware design, data, and smart recommendations can make every minute useful and energizing.
Stephanie talks through practical moves, ranging from using i‑Ready insights to shape agendas, building sessions that start with a shared focus and then branch into choice-based breakouts, and closing with concrete plans teachers can implement tomorrow. We discuss pathways that respect unique contexts while keeping a common thread—clear outcomes tied to student impact.
If you’re ready to trade one-size-fits-all professional learning for a strategic, teacher-centered model, this conversation offers a blueprint you can start using right away.
Read the blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog
Follow us on Twitter: @CurriculumAssoc
Follow us on Instagram: @MyiReady
Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Curriculum Associates, an education technology company and the makers of iReady, presents the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Join host Haley Browning to hear tips, best practices, and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We believe all educators are extraordinary and we are here to support you. Hi everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Today I am joined by the wonderful Stephanie Lawkins, who is a vice president here at Curriculum Associates for the Educator Success Team. Today, Stephanie joins me to talk all about this idea of personalized professional learning, which may be a little bit different than the typical professional learning or professional development that you're used to in your typical classrooms. We talk through things like incorporating agency, using data, making sure that it is really fit and tailored to you as a teacher to make sure that you are getting the most out of your professional learning sessions. So with that, we hope you enjoyed today's episode with Stephanie. Hi Stephanie, welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators Podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Haley. I'm delighted to be here.
SPEAKER_00:We're so happy to have you. So Stephanie, I know you wrote an incredible blog that we'll make sure to link in the show notes for all of our listeners, but before that, I want to have you introduce yourself. So could you tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got to where you are today?
SPEAKER_01:Sure thing. I'm Stephanie Lawkins, as you said, and I work at Curriculum Associates, where my title is Vice President of Educator Success, which is exactly what it sounds like. I spend all my time thinking about how to help teachers and leaders support meaningful instruction and student growth. And I've been at CA for almost 12 years at this company. And I came via a school district, like many of us here, uh, in my case, New York City uh schools. And then I worked for another curriculum and learning company where my love of professional learning was really sparked.
SPEAKER_00:And that's a great segue into the topic of your blog. So thanks for that, Stephanie. But Stephanie, you wrote all about the power of personalized professional learning in your blog. And I would love to dive into that a little bit. So just to kind of level set for our listeners, what exactly is professional learning? Some people call it PD, some people call it PL, professional development. What does this mean?
SPEAKER_01:That's a great question. And I think that it's an important question because many of us have this traditional paradigm of professional development. As in service, you come into the room, there's somebody standing at the front of the room teaching. I'm there for anywhere from an hour to a whole day. And I'm hoping I get something out of it that I can take back to my classroom. And for me, I like to think of, you know, we call it professional learning instead of professional development because it really is all about how as a teacher or leader are you acquiring the information that you need to do what you want to be doing for kids better. And for me, that is regardless of where you are. Like that should be happening. I want your survey, your in-person sessions to be as engaging and feel like they are energizing you and leading you to take actions out as much as possible. But I also understand that you have very little time and that you want to find the right information for you and for your context quickly. Um, and you want it to understand who you are, and that that's as much of an important component of your learning as the sage on the stage model.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think a lot of that comes from this idea of the personalization piece versus just the generic, I'm going to come in for a professional learning session and stand and talk at you. Whereas with this idea of personalization, there is more of an opportunity to kind of dive in, give the teachers exactly what they need, and make it more approachable and doable in their classrooms that day, even. With that, I would love to dive in a little bit more into this idea of the power of using data. And you talked about this in your blog a little bit. We talk about it all the time with our students using the power of data in the classroom. Why is this important for us to think about when planning for professional learning sessions?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, I think back to where I was before I came to Curriculum Associates, which was a learning company uh with great curriculum, great people, and we just didn't have the insights into student learning like we do. Like we have the gift of iRady, and we have so much insight into what kids are doing and what they're learning. And it just feels for me like I think all the time about we are so good at personalized learning for students at curriculum associates, and like my big, hairy, audacious goal is why can't we be the same for adults? Right? We know so much, like what teachers, what leaders are trying to do is based off of the kids. Everything, the kids are always at the center. So, how might we bring that student data along with everything that we already know about the state that you're in, what your district is doing? We know your school calendar, we know in some cases your pacing calendar if you're using ready classroom mathematics or magnetic reading. And like, how do we bring that all in? Because it feels to me like the ultimate gift that we can give to make professional learning the best it can be for teachers and leaders is context. And so, how do we bring that context both about you and about your students to give you the learning that you don't have to go searching for that serves you in the moment?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's really powerful. And and I like that you talked about we have all of this information and these goals for our students. We also should bring those to teachers. Like we recognize the importance of it. And and with that, something that we talk about with students all the time is this idea of choice and agency. And you also talk in your blog about how this can carry over into the world of teaching as well, and in the world of personalized professional learning. What might this look like in a professional learning session? How do you incorporate agency and uh choice?
SPEAKER_01:So again, uh I think that there's always going to be a need in an in-person everyone in the same room session to be speaking. You know, we try to speak to K2 teachers versus three, five teachers versus six, eight teachers. There's always going to be something of a need to address everyone in the room. We can break people, we can break uh groups up into small groups, but I think the opportunities for the true personalization really come into play virtually, whether it's you're joining a session, a PL session with an expert who has a background very similar to you, or you are a special ed teacher, and when you're attending most PL sessions at your school, it has more of a general ed focus, but you're able to find support that is for you by someone who knows you, right? And um, and I think this idea of, you know, you talked about choice and agency. Ideally, every teacher would get to choose the session in all aspects of their PL experience that was best suited to what they wanted. And like that, that's hard because school leaders, school districts are having to make choices about how to curate the PL schedule. But when you think about the online environment, if we bring what we know about you, I think about Netflix all the time. So when I go to Netflix, I have access to every single thing in Netflix's content library. I typically choose something that's new or recommended for me. And I don't go delving into the huge body of content because Netflix knows enough about me and what I like and what people in my area are watching that I don't have to do that searching. And that's what I aspire for for our educators, that they could find anything they wanted, but that they don't have to because we know enough about their context and about them to select for them.
SPEAKER_00:I love that comparison, and that feels like my, you know, my day-to-day every time I'm settling in on the couch, gonna decide what I'm gonna dive into.
SPEAKER_01:I'm not gonna say what the top recommendations are for me because they probably are actually for teenagers and I will watch them, but that's okay.
SPEAKER_00:I'm right there with you. Sometimes you just get sucked into this. Um, and with that, Stephanie, um, you had also talked about this idea of virtual PL and using that as an opportunity. And in your blog, you you tie this into this idea of coherence. Yeah. And so I would love to kind of tap into that a little bit more. We know coherence is definitely a buzzword in in education right now, and kind of bringing coherence into the world of professional learning. Could you expand on that a little bit more? What may our teachers see? Things like that.
SPEAKER_01:I was just writing about this for something else, right before we started recording and very about this. Like this idea of, you know, we're asking teachers and leaders more and more to participate in learning in a variety of settings. Like again, in the traditional in-person. You might be doing something in a PLC that's led by someone in your school. You might be taking asynchronous courses, you might be participating in live online sessions. And the thing that's really on my mind is all good professional learning is outcomes-based. So I should be able to know from each session that you attend, regardless of format, the outcomes that you covered. My dream for teachers and leaders is to be able to have a comprehensive learning record of everything they've done, regardless of format. So when I log into a central hub for professional learning, you see, here is the path that I've already been on, here's where I could go next, here are the essential outcomes I haven't covered yet, here's the optionality that I have, because it respects that learning takes place in all different places and that the individual has different like I also would love for a teacher to be able to say, gosh, the next essential outcome for me has to do with uh planning a math lesson rooted in conceptual understanding. I feel really good about that. I'm gonna check that off for myself, right? So I can move on. So it's this idea of accepting that everything that a teacher or a leader is learning comes into play and not forcing you into a path, but allowing you to build a learning experience based off of like the multiplicity of who you are and what you take in and your experience level to create a coherent learning experience for yourself.
SPEAKER_00:That's really powerful. And it it truly translates like into the classroom as well. You know your students, you know what they have. Maybe you're checking your prerequisite reports, you know what your students already know. And so the idea of being able to take a step back and reflect on that as your own learning is happening is very, very powerful. So I love that. Thank you so much, Stephanie. Um, and with that, Stephanie, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up for today. For those that are listening um and would like to hear more or read more about Stephanie's blog, that will be linked in the show notes. Um and with that, thank you so much for your time today, Stephanie. Thank you so much. Get inspired by following us on social, and please tag us in your posts on X at Curriculum Association and on Instagram at My IReady. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest, or want to be a guest, email extraordinaryeducators at caink.com. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you'd like to help more educators like you join the conversation, please leave us a review. Remember, be you, be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators Podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Curriculum Associates believes that with the right support, all children can reach grade level. We provide evidence-based high-quality instructional materials and world-class implementation services to classrooms across the United States. Editing completed by Shane Lowe, social media by Absidi Hannon, guestbooking and production by Hayley Browning. This podcast is Copyrighted Materials and Intellectual Property of Curriculum Associates.