What Makes an ADI Facilitator Institute Different from an ADI Workshop?

A district science coordinator sent me this question last month:

“We’ve had teachers attend ADI workshops before, and they loved them. Now someone has suggested we send a few people to a Facilitator Institute instead. What is actually different? Isn’t it just a longer workshop?”

It is not a longer workshop. The two experiences share a lot of surface features, since both put participants inside an ADI investigation, both move through the seven stages, and both involve plenty of talk. But they have different goals, and that difference changes almost everything about how the time is spent.

The simplest way I can put it is this: a workshop helps you teach students with ADI. A Facilitator Institute helps you teach teachers to teach with ADI. Those are different kinds of expertise, and the second one does not come automatically from the first.

What an ADI Workshop Does

Our implementation workshops come in two forms. The one-day Condensed Introduction has teachers experience a full ADI investigation from the student perspective, explore each stage of the model through guided reflection, and learn practical strategies for supporting student talk, writing, and thinking. The two-day Comprehensive Introduction includes all of that, plus teaching rehearsals, time to plan how to integrate ADI into existing units with peers, and dedicated reflection on equity and real classroom challenges.

The goal of a workshop is classroom readiness. A teacher should leave knowing what each stage is for, having felt what it is like to be a student in an investigation, and ready to try one with their own class.

What a Facilitator Institute Adds

The Facilitator Institute, sometimes called a Train-the-Trainer workshop, is an in-person experience designed to help instructional leaders, specialists, and experienced teachers become certified to lead our Introduction to ADI workshops (Comprehensive or Condensed) in their own schools or districts. Participants experience the model firsthand, learn how to lead each stage, and practice facilitating with feedback from our team. They are grouped by grade band (elementary or secondary) and content area (science, math, or engineering), so the practice is tailored to the teachers they will eventually support.

Here are four differences that matter most.

1. Participants learn to hold two stances at once.

In a workshop, you participate as a student. In an institute, you have to participate as a student and, at the same time, watch how the experience is being built for you. A facilitator has to be able to step out of the investigation at the right moments and make the design visible: why the initial model comes before the readings, why the reporter is named in advance, why the Reflect stage has its own minutes.

2. Participants develop a rollout plan for the next two years.

A workshop ends when teachers leave the room. An institute ends with a plan. Participants map out which workshops their district will offer and when, who will be invited to each one, and who will lead them. They work through the budget, including substitute coverage, materials, and time on the calendar. And they decide in advance how they will know whether ADI is sticking, such as what they will look for during walkthroughs and what they will ask teachers along the way. A plan like this turns a group of newly certified facilitators into a district strategy, rather than a few people waiting to be asked.

3. Participants prepare for the questions teachers ask.

Anyone who has led professional learning knows that the hardest moments are not in the agenda. They are the questions: “Isn’t this front-loading content?” “Aren’t students supposed to explore before they explain?” “What do I do when a group finishes early?” A facilitator needs well-reasoned answers to those questions, grounded in how the model works and why, not just in their own classroom experience.

4. Participants learn to spot near-misses in other people’s teaching.

A strong ADI teacher knows when their own discussion has gone flat. A strong facilitator can see it in someone else’s classroom and name it in a way that helps. That is a different skill, and it is the one districts most need when they move from launching ADI to sustaining it.

Which One Do You Need?

If your goal is to get a group of teachers started, a workshop is the right choice. If your goal is to make ADI something your district can carry on its own, across years, across campuses, and through staff turnover, you need people who can lead the workshop themselves.

The districts I have seen sustain ADI the longest are almost always the ones that invested in a bench of internal facilitators early, before they needed one. When a new cohort of teachers arrives in August, they do not have to wait for an outside trainer. Someone down the hall can run the introduction, and that same person is there in October when a teacher wants help with the Share stage.

It is also worth thinking about who goes. The best candidates are usually not only the strongest ADI teachers in the building. They are the people other teachers already go to for help, who are curious about why things work, and who are likely to be in the district for a while.

Putting It All Together

A workshop and a Facilitator Institute are not two sizes of the same thing. One builds a teacher’s capacity to use a model with students. The other builds a district’s capacity to grow that expertise without outside help.

What I have come to believe is that most implementations do not fade because the first workshop was weak. They fade because nobody inside the system was ever prepared to do what the first workshop did, so the learning stopped when the trainer left.

How ADI Makes This Easier

Facilitators do not have to build the professional learning from scratch. They lead the same Introduction to ADI workshops our team leads, using the same materials, the same investigations, and the same stage structure teachers will use in their classrooms. Because every ADI investigation and design challenge follows the same seven stages, what a facilitator learns to lead in one context carries over to the next.

That consistency is what makes it possible to scale ADI in a way that stays true to the model rather than drifting a little further with each retelling.

Thinking about building internal capacity?

Learn more about ADI workshops and the Facilitator Institute, and request one for your district, at argumentdriveninquiry.com/professional-learning