Professional Learning for
Districts and Ecosystems
Better Questions provides professional learning for
teachers, schools, and learning ecosystems that ignites
inquiry-driven learning and is personalized to your unique needs.
How Long?
Cohorts are a series of workshops spread across several weeks, a semester, or a school year, and are designed for a small group to collectively assess and improve practices in a focus area to build a sustained learning community of highly motivated educators.
Workshops range from one hour to half-day and are designed to ignite thinking around a topic and create action steps for shifting personal practice.
Who?
Schools
Districts
Individual Educators
What Topics?
Culture: anti-bias and antiracism (ABAR), leadership training, student voice and choice,
values assessment and design,
teachers as learners and leaders
Pedagogy: inquiry-driven, critical pedagogy, competency-based learning, remote learning, STEM for curiosity
Innovation: technology playdates, rethinking data, artificial intelligence and ethics, mapping for critical noticing
Options for customization
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Deeper Empathy. Stronger Curiosity. Braver Equity. Better Questions.
Teaching and learning are incredibly complex acts, idiosyncratic to each person, in each classroom, in each community. Having worked for over 15 years in both formal and informal learning environments, we bring a unique understanding of and deep appreciation for the importance of context in the acts of teaching and learning. And while we have seen how different classroom practices manifest from district to district, we have also seen that those teachers who are most capable of fostering growth in their students are those who still know that they themselves are learners, too.
For Better Questions, learning is a process of progressive transformations - not bound by the time a student spends in a class, the number of correct answers on a test, the year they graduate, or the number of years spent in a profession. We believe the significance of education is not just the fulfillment of a PD requirement but in reconnecting educators to the reasons they joined this field, to continue growing the capacities of what it means to be human, and to promote the ideals of a more just and equitable world.
Evolving out of research on best practices in professional learning and development for teachers, Better Questions draws on highly relevant strategies, steeped in multiple educational traditions. We have seen the impact that critical pedagogical practices have brought to our work in thinking deeply about established systems, engaging in inquiry on personally relevant topics, and designing strategies that empower others in their learning ecosystem. In similar ways, aesthetic education offers us a fresh view and new language for thinking deeply about human capacities such as empathy, curiosity, and critical noticing, how these intangibles manifest in our classrooms, and how we might be more intentional in assessing growth for learners of all ages. Lastly, our work is deeply inspired by the immense contributions of a lineage of constructivist theorists and practitioners drawing on the importance of making time for active reflection, sustaining engagement with teachers over time, and designing active facilitation strategies that leverage the social nature of learning in context.
