Breaking the ice or breaking trust? Rethinking icebreakers as pedagogical mismatch in professional development

Icebreakers are among the most common opening activities in teacher professional development (PD), and their prevalence has outpaced critical examination of whether they serve adult professionals. This paper identifies a pedagogical mismatch in the use of content-free, mandatory icebreaker formats, which import practices designed for K–12 learners into settings governed by adult norms of autonomy and professional expertise. Three theoretical lenses ground the analysis. Knowles’s andragogy specifies what adult learners require, self-determination theory (SDT) identifies the psychological needs whose thwarting produces disengagement, and professional identity scholarship explains how teachers, as credentialed experts, experience that thwarting. The paper makes three contributions. First, it proposes a typology of icebreaker formats organized by content relevance and participant agency, giving the field a tool for distinguishing opening activities that honor adult learners from those that undermine them. Second, it applies adult learning theory to a taken-for-granted practice that existing critiques of facilitation and professional learning climate have not directly addressed. Third, it offers design principles grounded in andragogy and SDT and a future empirical agenda. Adjacent research on teacher perceptions of PD, affective responses to compliance-based structures, and teacher resistance situates these claims. Direct empirical study of icebreaker effects remains a needed next step.