Client Relations

Previous Chapter

Short Answer

Crowley: “…What was it he said that got everyone so upset?”

Aziraphale: “Be kind to each other.”

Crowley: “Oh yeah. That’ll do it.”

Crowley and Aziraphale, Good Omens (Mackinnon, 2019)

Education involves working with people. It’s relationship management with those below, alongside, and above you. If you cannot do this well, you’ll struggle. If you treat your peers well, you’ll (likely) get treated well in turn. At the same time, peers may treat you poorly for reasons out of your control and significantly determine how good or bad a job is in a given environment.

You’ll need to learn how to work with people you disagree with, or force their issues upon you, without taking things personally.

This includes handling brilliant jerks; those who are smart and know what they’re doing, but are generally unkind.
You may also have to work with decisions you’ll personally disagree with.

Goals are often, if not almost always, mismatched amongst different roles. To keep it simple:

People above you (e.g. managers, administration) care about outcomes and communication.
People beside you (e.g. employees on same “level”) care about technical expertise and knowledge.
Consumers (e.g. parents, students, etc.) care about quality goods and services for their time/money.

Goals can greatly differ amongst peers as well. For example, with two people in the same role, someone may seek technical excellence/perfection while another wants to ship things out and get results fast.

“Resume driven development” may be a goal you’ll see as well.

Teachers and instructors, or any particular person/group, are not exempt from also being the problem. Every person can cause issues, but rarely does every person cause issues simultaneously.

A lot of advice assumes people are rational and not crazy. In practice, that’s rarely the case. Read many things with a grain of salt.

Long Answer

Notice: This chapter is written from the perspective of an educator/instructor.

Diplomacy is the strategy and tactic to master relationships with others. Threatening litigation, or another similar act, is when that working relationship immediately ends and it’s time to bring in the attorney. On that same note, education systems must be allowed to enforce consequences. For many schools and education systems, this means enforcing consequences on the student and parent both, but at least the student in every education system.

Sometimes there are problems people already know how to fix but the main thing stopping people from fixing it is, well, other people.

E.g. A status quo (existing environment) may persist because people still benefit from it.

The amount of information you can display about students is staggering. In most schools, at least in the United States, interested parties like parents and adult students have 24/7 access to grades, progress reports, schedules, and more, but will still complain about not getting enough notice and a lack of communication.

The amount of time a teacher spends per day with a student is not a reasonable fix, despite people thinking it is. That’s not the teacher’s issue at that point.
For the U.S., FERPA has provisions and guides written for the public (U.S. DoE, 2021).

The amount of legally allowed information an educator can share is equally staggering. Even in cases such as one student bullying or physically threatening another student, educators may not be allowed to share the information of the students involved due to privacy laws. Though there are exceptions, they are quite narrow in scope.

Sometimes convincing your boss (or other authority figure) is as easy as having the problem(s) happen to them too or giving them front row seats to the chaos.

Key word: Sometimes.

You may also hear the terms “upstream stakeholders” and “downstream stakeholders” for people. Though more common in supply chain and system contexts, think of upstream stakeholders as those who supply goods and services to deliver and downstream stakeholders as those who receive said goods or services. If an instructor were an example, support staff and administrators may be upstream stakeholders while students may be downstream stakeholders to an instructor, who is the manufacturer (or “hub”) managing resources to create and deliver instruction.

Before we go any further, let me emphasize one point clearly. Every stakeholder listed here holds responsibility and accountability in an education system. Every one of them.

Perceptions and Stereotypes

Bias is unavoidable, ever-present, and unlikely to go away anytime soon. Everyone has unconscious bias and it’s your role to identity which biases matter and how to adapt to them. It’s the things people don’t say they do, but still do it anyway–the unknown knowns.

You might also hear this mentioned as stereotypes and this applies to many things, such as gender, race, and more. It affects how you handle things like classroom management and is often out of your control and shaped by the dynamics of the environment people grow up in.

I’ll stick with one example here: gender.

Gender shapes perceptions of teachers, whether people admit it or not. Male teachers often have more authority in discipline and less backlash on appearances, but face more scrutiny on what they say and do. Female teachers may provide more support networks and have lower fears of retaliation, but may be more likely to face sexual assault, misogyny, and have their appearance and classroom authority questioned by students, parents, co-workers, administration, and more.

I’ve seen, multiple times, male students treat female teachers worse, but male teachers better, despite both sets of teachers sharing the same roles, responsibilities, and skills.
Small aside: these same dynamics may occur to non-teachers and professionals across multiple fields too.

With gender, teachers and professors are not classified as a “bona fide occupational qualification” (BFOQ), so you legally cannot discriminate by gender for who gets into a teaching role in the United States (Further reading on BFOQ) (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1982).

Notice: BFOQ is an exception to existing laws, like Title VII (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2009).

Should this happen in a teaching setting, from anyone, then keep the following in mind:

Judge based on the values, actions, and conduct of a person; not their background.
Notions on respect and disrespect towards someone regardless of gender, etc. can be taught.

A Non-Education Analogy

Earlier I mentioned how teachers and instructors in the education system are the ones most likely to receive complaints from students, parents, and other “downstream” stakeholders.

For some readers, it may make more sense to compare it to complaining about a piece of technology or application you use daily. I’ll use video games as an example.

You may enjoy playing a video game, but you encounter multiple issues within the game that, fairly or not, drive you to complain about it. Who do you complain to? The developers.

These employees are accessible targets for feedback and represent the front-facing, interface layer users engage with. Developers and instructors/teachers are in the same position. Both help create the content you interact with, but neither holds full control of the design process and final product. Developers implement design within technical constraints whereas teachers implement curricula within institutional and policy constraints.

There’s usually less consideration given for other stakeholders influencing the product. This includes publishers, stakeholders (external and internal), QA, Legal, Marketing and Sales, and executives. Some users may investigate further and figure out upstream issues, but that usually requires deeper knowledge of how the system(s) functions.

Within both simple and complex systems, complaints flow downstream to the most visible participant in a system even if they’re not responsible. This isn’t limited to only instructors and developers either; any front-facing role may face these same issues.

Administrators

Principals, deans, and assistant principals are your “boss” if you were an instructor/teacher. They’re like directors or higher level managers. They oversee school performance, budgets, staffing, policies, public relations, personnel management, and more while under the jurisdiction of their District and the Department of Education. They also handle things teachers may not want to deal with, like most complaints, legal issues, and multiple meetings.

i.e. they’re not easily replaced because they work with people and relationship management.

They have a lot of real power, but often have hands tied outside of their control for reasons like state and federal regulations and legal consequences for actions.

For example, much like how employees have bosses, if you’re a teacher/instructor and have a good administrator, you’ll just “know.” It’s hard to describe the sensation in text and is something you’ll have to experience yourself to fully understand.

As for signs of a bad administrator, usually an administrator that gets hired in and immediately works towards changing things is a red flag. This goes for any manager+ in general, but it’s generally better to observe and understand how the current system works for at least 1 month (or longer), then figuring out what the real problems are and implementing solutions. It allows time to ask questions, collect data, and verify circumstances.

A primary goal is to ensure good PR for the facility (or facilities) they manage and avoiding lawsuits. This may mean bending the knee to demands both reasonable and unreasonable.

They want their education system to perform well and they hold a large responsibility for its success or failure. A district and even the state or federal Department of Education also have a vested interest and want good returns on the investment they put into the school.

For smaller schools, you may need only a single principal and the teachers may pitch in to cover deficiencies. For larger schools, you’ll still have one “principal.” Still, many roles are divided or partitioned out amongst multiple people, such as assistant principals or deans. These roles assume some duties similar to a principal, but focus on specific duties (such as discipline), groups of students (such as finance major students), or specialized administrative tasks (such as Legal Counsel and HR Manager). The principal still has a hand in the affairs of everything at the school and has a surprisingly large amount of legal power.

As a teacher or instructor, your role, in their eyes, is to produce the results the principal(s) need you to achieve with your students. Outside of that, when dealing with administrators as a teacher, you want to do the following:

Follow chain of command
Stay calm, polite, and respectful
Document interactions (in writing when possible)
Bring solutions, not just problems, whenever possible
- No one likes complainers
Request for their help only when you actually need their help. It does two things:
- Make it seem like you have things under control
- Implicitly raise the urgency/severity of issues you do bring up
Ask clarifying questions, not state raw opinions, on decisions they made
- Also prepare evidence to inform decisions you support, if applicable
Keep gradebooks and lesson plans updated
Make their job easier and they’ll usually make yours easier in turn

Another interesting reality about teachers and principals is potentially misaligned goals. A teacher may, validly, focus their goal on educating students. A principal may focus on meeting graduation rates and test scores as their goal. The goals, despite both working towards showcasing high levels of student learning, will probably not align and you’ll have conflicts over teaching methodologies as a result. Expect and prepare for when that happens.

Parents & Adult Students

I think of parents (and guardians) as apple trees. They’re a significant influence on all students you’re dealing with. It was true while I was an active teacher and likely still true today and in the future.

Much like apple trees, you’ll want the first interaction with them to be positive or at least neutral. Think of the “positive interaction” as like planting the tree in good soil and providing it enough water to settle its roots down during the transplant (i.e. “honeymoon”) phase.

Parents and adult students are also the closest thing educational systems have as “customers.”

…Which means they’re “always” right, even when they’re beyond a doubt incorrect. The power of the wallet is strong.

Imagine you own a business, but you’re a teacher. Now imagine your “clients” are the parents of your students or, if old enough to be legally independent, the students themselves. Sometimes your administrator will support you in handling this category. Other times, they’ll side with parents to appease complaints or keep the peace. It depends on the administrator and it’s less something you can easily change.

The goal of most parents is opportunities, success, safety, and learning for their children. A parent’s logic is not the same as conventional reasoning; what seems rational to parents may not seem rational to non-parents. To narrow this divide, parents should work with, not against, teachers and educational staff.

There’s also legal consequences as an incentive. In multiple states in the United States, as of June 2025, “failure to educate” is potentially grounds for mandatory reporting under the definition of neglect (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2025).

When handling parents of students, you’ll want to keep records of interactions, how policies are enforced, and evidence of learning (whether positive or negative). You may also request administrators or a second colleague to show up to meetings with them to act as a witness if there are potential issues with meeting them.

For adult learners, treat them as students and not friends. You aren’t as age-restricted on what you can say, but everyone, teacher and student, have more legal responsibility and freedom compared to younger students. Boundaries and professional demeanor still matters.

With everyone involved here, you’ll want to set expectations from day one, if not even earlier than day one. It saves you time and also quickly establishes the environment they’re dealing with.

I also cannot stress enough: parents hold significant leverage over their children (or an educator’s students). They’re like customers paying to use your product/service. Adult students have similar dynamics to parents, but more based on their own interests. Parents also spend significantly more time with these students than teachers ever will, so their influence on said student’s behavior and actions, as well as the environment they raise the student in, is much higher.

Simply put, the parents typically break or make a child’s life, education, and future.
The parent and their child (a teacher’s student) should be told “no” sometimes to protect themselves, their children (students), and the entire education system from irreparable damage.
From personal observation: a problem at school with a student is typically a problem at home with parents, especially with students showing consistent/persistent bad behaviors.
- If you want a technical viewpoint, see Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory or the Bioecological model (Guy-Evans, 2025).

If I were to describe some ways parents can negatively affect their children’s views of education and performance in school, it’d probably say some of the following:

Too much screen time (or technology overly used to pacify children)
Scared of their child being bored or unhappy
Solving problems for the child instead of letting the child solve them
Controlling social interactions too much
A lack of interest in said child’s education
Maintaining negative views about education and particular subjects, like math
Always, and/or immediately, fixing any uncomfortable situation or getting rid of obstacles
Not reading to kids or at least encouraging kids to read
Meeting children’s physical needs, but not their emotional needs
- i.e. satisfying the lower tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (McLeod, 2025).

There’s also the parent(s) who claim there’s nothing they can do after trying everything. More often than not, it comes from parents where their children still have their phones, drive themselves to school, can freely spend money, have access to video games, etc. In other words, they don’t enact punishments which affect what the child, your student, values until behavior is fixed.

Without parents and their children, school enrollment drops, reduced funding soon follows, and schools cannot operate effectively. This could be due to parents leaving the school from concerns mostly outside of your control, like parents lacking funds, or concerns about the educational system in general. At the same time, parents may also make complaints and reviews out of ignorance or without consideration to the resources and constraints of educational systems. Though they are complaints, they still lead to decisions which, for better or worse, affect education as a whole.

What this means is educational staff across multiple organizational layers may make decisions to keep parents, and donors by extension, satisfied, even when it conflicts with educational interests. It may not always be a principal, or you, who enforces this, but instead someone with influence or a group higher up the chain-of-command making the decision for your organization. You also may not see the negative consequences of these decisions for years to come, but they could still be happening in the present.

Lastly, the ideal scenario is a parent’s child, the teacher’s student, is never written up or they receive a communication from education staff about their negative behaviors. If that occurs, that is almost always happening after multiple intervention methods were tried and failed. That now means the parent is expected to exercise their rights and privileges as a parent and enforce consequences for the student’s actions. A permissive parent in this scenario will backfire on everyone, including the student, in the education system.

If there is no structure, consequences, and expectations for students, don’t be surprised when a child/student cannot function in a society later on in life.
This scenario also does not immediately mean said student is being “targeted.” The Earth revolves around the Sun, not the parent or the student, and teachers have to balance this one student with every other student and moving piece in the classroom.
Depending on the parent(s) response, they may or may not be reported for failure to educate.

Other Teachers/Instructors

It’s easy to spot a bad teacher/instructor. They think they’re amazing. On top of that, the worst teachers are those who are authoritarian figures, strict to be strict, strict so they just don’t have to deal with students, or overall just mean. That, or they don’t even know what material they’re teaching. It can be both.

The good teachers I’ve seen and worked with have an air of humility behind them. They think their work is flawed in some way, but still strive to improve in areas they believe they’re lacking in. By allowing themselves to view their own work with some negativity (not complete negativity; there’s a difference), they can spot problems and design solutions an overoptimistic, or perhaps arrogant, teacher may not catch.

The great teachers I’ve seen are what I’m going to call “middle” teachers; fair but firm. They balance the line between being strict enough to not tolerate misconduct or learning disruptions, but also aware enough to know when they should ease up, be flexible, read the room, and lighten the mood. If they’re strict and teach in a way students understand and stay quiet so they can focus, then they’re really great.

All of this includes what I said about good teachers before too.

You’ll almost certainly work with other teachers. If the school is small, you may be the only teacher present for a particular grade or field of expertise. If the school is larger, you may be amongst other professionals in similar areas to what you’re teaching, like multiple engineering professors in a single department.

In any of these cases, you’ll find yourself working with teachers of varying skill levels, experience, and backgrounds. Other teachers are your allies, resources, and sounding boards to check your sanity. You can share ideas about how to operate classrooms, but respect their downtime.

Avoid talking about sensitive topics like religion and politics unless you’re sure the other teachers you’re around are OK with civil discussion on those topics.

Even then, be wary of talking about these topics in public and private spaces. Who knows who is listening in.

Lastly, if you’re planning events for teachers where they receive something or gifts are involved, like a catered lunch, give a heads up and/or inform in advance when it happens.

This can apply to other professions, but especially true for teaching and roles where chaos can occur at any given time throughout the workday.

Secondary & Primary Education Students

Why do students fall under clients? It’s because they’re the ones receiving your services: the material you’re teaching them!

You might also think only parents are “stakeholders” for their children/the students. That’s not the case in reality; the education system has society as a whole as the student’s stakeholders. Education, especially public education, provides learning opportunities to individuals to then contribute to society later in their lives.

That’s where the comparison to clients stops with them, because this section talks about minors. They’re strictly considered children unless they’re the legal, adult age in your sovereign state/country.

There are some consistent “truths” I observed with students (young and adult) in classes.

The best students are held accountable at school, home, and outside of school in general.
Students lie to avoid doing “work” and to avoid consequences.
- A major reason why I say to collect evidence and document events.
They deal with many of the same problems you had as a child (assuming the reader is an adult here), but with somewhat different mechanisms depending on their environment.
Students (i.e. Minors) cannot control whether or not they come to school. Parents and legal mandates do.
Students are always testing you.

If anyone tells you a student is an angel, or smart, or some similar comment about how they never cause trouble, don’t believe them at first. That type of comment is typically a red flag. If a student were truly smart or benevolent, they’d also be smart enough to know not to cause behavioral issues. I’ve also seen cases where smart people are extremely good at manipulation of staff, peers, etc. to get what they want as well.

This category mainly applies for students still considered minors. The biggest thing to note is minors don’t follow the (exact) same rules as adults when it comes to learning. Sometimes, younger students genuinely do not know any better because they haven’t been taught any better; you’re often working with a (mostly) blank canvas.

As for managing them, a general rule of thumb: the more things students are kept busy with or doing inside of a classroom, the fewer behavior problems they’ll cause. It’s harder to cause issues when they’re dealing with something else right in front in them, so to speak.

For students in general, you want to go in with as few assumptions as possible; the fewer, the better. Here are some assumptions you can safely make about students, but also be ready to change them if needed:

They may not know the material you’re teaching
What seems easy to you may be complicated for them
There are emotions and feelings that a student may not be able to express well
They may not be familiar with the same tools you are familiar with (like computers)
They may not follow your instructions well and/or correctly the first time

Think of teaching like sales. If material is engaging and desireable, students buy into it. If not, they won’t buy into it despite any tangible benefits provided. Some students may view activities more pragmatically, like payoff vs time and effort put in.

One strategy I’ve used is explicitly asking the students what kind of activities they want to learn and do within the limits of the curriculum. This method ensures they have a way to “buy in” or invest their time into what I’m teaching. For already motivated students, this won’t do as much. For students on the fence or less motivated, it’s like providing a free side with their entree, which may boost their motivation and increase the chances of buying in.

It is possible students bring in factors you may not be able to fix or fall outside initial assumptions. These may include lack of accountability, apathy, learning accommodations, and more. They may refuse to do things and also refuse to use the accommodations provided, even if legally required to make available to said student(s). They may even have no respect for adults because they’ve seen adults in their own life be disrespectful! There’s only so much you can do for them, which is why documenting learning efforts and interactions with students is extremely important in case someone claims you didn’t appropriately perform your duties as an instructor.

Additionally, it’s also easy to tell signs of when a student has too much screen time and/or not enough time to sleep per AAP guidelines (2025). Some examples, which lead to that conclusion from personal observation, include the following:

Sleeping a lot in class (poor sleep hygiene/management).
Parroting video phrases (not saying examples here to spare reader sanity and stay safe-for-work).
Talking constantly.
Being unable to engage in non-screen activities.
Abnormally short attention spans.
Immediately trying to access technology when entering class, except when explicitly required for the lesson(s).
Adopting speech patterns mimicing online video personalities too closely.
They quickly become bored and cannot accept delayed gratification.
Meltdowns and refusals when there’s no access to computers, phones, etc.

…This list could go on for quite a bit. Overall, students with behaviors and issues like these may also have issues with learning, cause issues inside the classroom, and potentially have overlap with, or mask, other unseen or unsaid issues. Additionally, these issues are typically the result of their environment enabling or normalizing them, intentionally or not. That environment can include parents, teachers, student peers, and other people reinforcing patterns.

While parents and relatives may think their student is special, classrooms typically have anywhere from a handful to dozens to hundreds/thousands of students at once with other students who may also be considered special.

If every student in the classroom is special, then none of the students are special (Bird, 2004).

Teachers are operating under time and resource constraints, which means they have to focus on equity and practicality to ensure fairness and material is delivered to as many students under their care as possible.

Lastly, remember to be friendly, but keep professional boundaries, between you and your students. You are in a position of authority over them, like a manager over an employee, and they also have to report to several other managers (i.e. teachers and sometimes administrators) at the same time. This typically means they’re juggling around several different classroom management plans at once rather than a single one across all classrooms.

Support Staff

Last, but certainly not least, are your fellow support staff.

Become friends with these people. Treat them well or expect bad conditions and more work very quickly for you.

These are people who work in the same environment, school, etc. as you, but aren’t necessarily your manager/boss or even a fellow educator. Support includes secretaries, IT, developers, engineers, custodians, maintenance staff, paraprofessionals, security, nurses, cafeteria staff, groundskeepers, and far more. Essentially, if they’re working in an education system or for an educational facility not as an administrator, student, or instructor/teacher/educator, they count here.

Without these people, your education system wouldn’t be able to keep rooms clean, offload specialized tasks from your own workload, and maintain a safe and orderly environment. It also would make dealing with the unseen issues, like ensuring the databases and software for education work properly to not interrupt an educator’s goals to, well, educate. Many support staff also focus on arranging substitutes to cover for you when you’re absent as well. Without them, you may have to take on more administrative tasks.

In short, they help you do your job, even if it’s indirect help.

Handling [Adult] Communications and Urgency

How do you know when something is important? I have some indicators:

It has a deadline.
It has consequences if not done (defined elsewhere or explicitly in a communication).
It can be verified whether or not you did it.
It has specific information (this part can be short or long in length).
It’s been asked about more than once.
It’s probably not sent as an email/text message.
It’s a life-threatening and/or medical emergency.

Your first year of teaching/instruction, you’re likely not going to “know” if something is important, so go through the process of responding as usual and figure out what things are actually important. Even in my first year of teaching, I didn’t “figure it out” until at least several months in. I don’t expect you to be perfect from day one.

When you develop an intuition for it, you’ll learn to better protect your time and what to prioritize.

Next question: How often should you check things like your email every day?

If you’re in a line of work like communication, social media, owning a business, or a manager, this is pretty often. If your primary work is NOT communicating, then you should plan out specific times of the day to look at emails, etc. and what days, like vacation days and weekends, to NOT look at emails, etc.

There’s also some “rules of thumb” to emails/texts I like to follow:

Keep it short
Reply only during work hours unless actually urgent
Some personalization
- E.g. “This student said they” -> “[Name of student] mentioned [pronoun]…”
If it avoids a 1 hour meeting, I’m making a 5 minute email
If the sender sends low-value messages like these, I’m ignoring it (No Hello, n.d.)

Over time, you’ll develop the intuition for what matters and when/how to respond.

The Veteran Worker vs New Manager Scenario

This could apply to many similar cases, such as:

Platoon Sergeant vs 2nd Lieutenant
Veteran Nurse vs New Doctor
Staff-level Engineer vs Non-technical Manager

In many fields like education, military, medicine, and so on, there’s a distinct difference in authority between what I’ll call “frontline” (i.e. enlisted) vs “midline/backline” (i.e. officer) staff.

To emphasize this point: People at all authority levels are not free of mistakes and authority =/= knowledge. Even someone who is competent and became an authority in a field later on in life can still be wrong.

You may have frontline workers with decades of experience under their hat. They know the in’s and out’s of the systems they work with, know what processes work well and don’t work well, and, most importantly, know when someone is about to do something they’ll regret.

For stricter organizations, this typically means the lower-ranking employee must obey the orders and requests from a higher-ranking employee, even when said orders are definitely terrible ideas.

In this scenario, let’s assume you’re the higher-ranking employee, you have little to no practical experience, and you want to not be a terrible “leader.” Just the desire to not want to be terrible and do the right thing solves most problems already. The remaining problems are dealt with methods like:

Acknowledging you will screw things up and be treated like you don’t know what you’re doing at first, while accepting this is normal and shouldn’t let it disturb you.
- Chances are, this organization functioned fine without you and may continue just fine without you too.
Not being an asshole.
Not changing anything for the first month by learning first how things work.
- Unless it’s a dire emergency that must be fixed right now.
Trusting your employees who have significantly more experience than you.
Learning about your job and purpose.
Learning about the organization, its mission, the equipment you have, etc.
Learning about the people under you, what they do (at least at a basic understanding), and find ways to let them do their job well.
Seek out the advice of people more experienced than you.
Lead by example.
Be willing to get your hands dirty and figure out the technical details of how things work.

You may encounter other scenarios, such as a team of veterans on equal authority with disagreements, non-cooperative agendas, and varying competence levels. In cases like these, you’ll need proper evidence to support claims, figure out if there’s bias in why they’re recommending one method over another, and seeing if the dissenters are actually right or wrong. It’s possible they could be right too, but poorly communicate or badly explain a point too! While picking a single advisor may seem correct, you also risk filtering decisions and opinions through one filter. Navigating scenarios like these is a skill you’ll have to practice over time, but there are ways to help right now:

Listening to multiple sides
Find track records (historical data) that show where decisions were correct vs incorrect back then vs now.
Going through follow-up questions to figure out why instead of only what/how.

What If I Don’t Know What They’re Talking About?

An indication of adulthood is one’s ability to be forward about what they do know and don’t know. After that, it’s the ability to learn how to ask about things you don’t know and finding answers. You might not be a manager, but a manager’s approach is OK for just about everyone here.

Let’s say your engineer buddy comes around and they start talking about Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Azure (as purely examples). Chances are, you probably are not familiar with all three of these things.

This is a case where you don’t know enough to make an informed decision or even an informed opinion. All it takes to fix this is asking said buddy about what they are and how they’re different. You may not be an expert in your buddy’s field, but you might catch a few things, like similar metrics.

From there, you can ask about tradeoffs, try and translate that back into what they’re talking about, and go from there. You could also take that information and figure out something else to implement or create as well.

It’ll take practice, but simply put: it’s like having a conversation and you don’t want to fake it.

Professional Developments (PD)

I have mixed opinions on this. These comments could apply to other professions, but I’m focusing on teachers/instructors here. In general, PD is good if it isn’t a waste of time.

In every professional development or administrative presentation, I want the person to just get to the point. There’s no reason to infantilize other adults; students or minors aren’t attending these events, so learning methods should cater towards adults and not minors/children.

It’s why every chapter has a “Short Answer” section at the top. I try to get to the point for those who want it! It’s useful and desired!

Professional development are electives/continuing education for professionals (i.e. teachers, staff, etc.) and provided, typically, by people with active roles outside of education. Teachers/instructors usually need X number of hours to maintain a certificate, license, etc. PD is based around andragogy, adult learning, rather than pedagogy teachers may be used to, so you may experience a disconnect while attending them. Nevertheless, if you do go to a PD, be reasonably respectful to presenters and other attendees.

On one hand, some of these are extremely valuable to teachers and instructors. They could be designed by people with actual classroom experience, so they understand the context reasonably well. They also focus on the content and avoid unneccessary fluff.

Sadly, in practice, these are the exception.

On the other hand, the PD sessions (not necessarily the presenters) are typically the bane of my existence for a variety of reasons:

Not appropriately designed for the intended audience (adult professionals teaching other adult professionals).
Not related to the grade level/audience a teacher manages.
The veracity of information presented is inadequate.
Presenter bias may overtake the course material intended for teachers.
The PD elective may be a veiled attempt at marketing materials created by the presenter.
A lack of proper research and evidence, which is the burden of the presenter(s), to support their material.
- This includes research paid to support specific conclusions as well.
It’s a subject requiring a particular background, but the presenter isn’t the appropriate background. (i.e. medical knowledge from a non-medical professional)
The PD is ironically designed and undermines its own goals (E.g. a 8 hour presentation on condensing words and sentences)

My favorite PD days were typically:

When I was allowed to choose which PD to pursue.
Sessions covering my content area(s).
An unofficial “do a quick, 15-minute report and check-up, then you can do your own work” day.
The PD is showing a program, process, system, etc. to go over relatively quickly (e.g. 15 minutes in a 1 hour session), then the rest of the time was working with a team. Usually food was included, but not always.

Bibliography

American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). (2025, May 22). Screen Time Guidelines. Www.aap.org. https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/qa-portal/qa-portal-library/qa-portal-library-questions/screen-time-guidelines/
- Original publish date: (2023, May 21)
Bird, B. (Director). (2004). The Incredibles [Film]. Pixar Animation Studios; Walt Disney Pictures.
Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2025, June 2). Definitions of child abuse and neglect - Child welfare Information Gateway. www.childwelfare.gov. https://www.childwelfare.gov/resources/definitions-child-abuse-and-neglect/
Guy-Evans, O. (2025). Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/Bronfenbrenner.html
- Further Reading: Bronfenbrenner, U. (1974). Developmental research, public policy, and the ecology of childhood. Child development, 45 (1), 1-5. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1127743
Mackinnon, D. (2019, May 31). Good Omens (T. Pratchett & N. Gaiman, Eds.; No. 3). Amazon Prime Video. Episode Name: “Hard Times”
McLeod, S. (2025, August 3). Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
no hello. (n.d.). Please Don’t Say Just Hello in Chat [Webpage]. No Hello. Retrieved August 16, 2025, from https://nohello.net/en/
United States Department of Education (U.S. DoE). (2021). A Parent Guide to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). https://studentprivacy.ed.gov/sites/default/files/resource_document/file/A%20parent%20guide%20to%20ferpa_508.pdf
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (1982, Jan 2). CM-625 bona fide occupational qualifications. www.eeoc.gov. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/cm-625-bona-fide-occupational-qualifications
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (2009). Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. www.eeoc.gov. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964