Remember when professional learning felt like a luxury?

When you couldn't wait to arrive at the conference or pull up a seat next to a colleague in a planning room? When research was a verb instead of a noun, and the notion of it ever being settled seemed antithetical to real learning?

Remember?

Remember when we had entire days to design things together? Entire years to test them and reflect on what it all meant?

I do.

There's never been enough time, and resources have always been tight. Systems have always been messy, and we've never felt entirely satisfied.

But we were curious, then.

Hungry.

Hopeful.

Connected.

Collaborative.

Remember when the greatest voices in the field had the wisdom of experience and incredible humility, despite their expertise?

Remember when they were our elders? Our mentors? The people who looked over our shoulders as we came up? The ones who invited us to stand on theirs?

I remember.

And here is what surprised me when I sat with all of these memories recently: I realized that I don't actually want to go back.

It's not the conference rooms I miss, or the long uninterrupted days. It's the curiosity my colleagues carried. Their hunger. It's the feeling of building something with people I trusted, and being looked after by people who were just a little further down the road than I was back then.

Those are all of the things I ache for, and honestly: Those things are not gone.

If anything, we have more of what makes them possible now than we've ever had. We have more ways to learn. We have more access. There are more voices worth hearing than any conference program could ever hold. We're able to connect across distance and time zones and the actual circumstances of our lives in ways we could barely imagine back then. We're far more dynamic than we used to be. Our lives are fuller, and they're more complicated for sure but also? I can't help but feel they're more interesting.

So why does this work feel so heavy now?

There are a thousand answers to that question. Many focus on things we can't control. Here's what I know, though: Professional learning is still built the way it was decades ago. We're still using the same tight frames and structures. The workshop day. The staff development room. A schedule the building principal set. Content delivered to tolerant people who are expected to leave whoever they really are at the door.

We keep trying to press our whole dynamic selves, and our full and complicated lives, into that old shape.

I think the pain lives in that friction. I feel it every time I try to fit real learning into a calendar that has no room for it. Every time I facilitate for people who are raising young children and caring for aging parents and working a second job after they're done teaching each day, just to make ends meet. Every time teachers tell me I'm bringing one more initiative that lands hard on top of the last one. We've grown. We're at maximum capacity.

The old frameworks for professional learning simply don't fit, and we rub against the edges constantly. It's a strange nostalgia, perhaps. Maybe you feel it too: the ache of having outgrown something we haven't let go of just yet.

We can do that, though.

We can let go.

We can move forward, too. Toward something different. Something new.

We can co-design professional learning experiences that are democratic instead merely delivered. Experiences that allow people to bring their whole embodied selves and learn in more than one way, across time and across space. Professional learning that bends around the complex lives they're actually living. We can design professional learning to bear the weight people carry. We can design it to engage and satisfy the people facilitating it, too.

Remember our elders? The ones who had our backs as we came up, and then invited us to stand on theirs?

We get to become them now, and not by preserving the frame they worked inside, but by building one that fits this moment.

That is what The Intentional Facilitator is all about. The struggle is real, but so is the invitation to recognize what's possible. This is where we can start designing frameworks for professional learning that honor who we have become.

I remember when professional learning felt like a luxury.

I think what's ahead can be better than what we remember, though. I really do. Come build it with us.