What are the most important aspects of designing professional learning activities that are meaningful to the teachers but also aligned to standards?

The most important aspects of designing professional learning activities for teachers is to make sure that it is something that the teacher can actually use in the classroom to help student learning and understanding.  I can’t tell you how many learning activities or professional development hours I’ve had to sit through that in no was helped me improve my teaching or benefited my students in any way. It was just done so that people could check the box that it was done.  For this last year with the Alabama Quality Teaching Standards we can 3 of the standards that we focused on for the year. One was chosen by the district, one was chosen by the school, and the last we got to chose. I would saw that the one that I chose what probably benefited me the most because it was something that I wanted to grow in.   I chose 2.8 Uses formative assessments to provide specific and timely feedback to assist learners in meeting learning targets and to adjust instruction. It's not that I did do this at all before, it is just that it was somewhere where I felt I could improve on and I know that there were some professional development opportunities that were available to me over the course of the school year.  Since this was something that I wanted to learn and I knew that it was going to positively affect both my teaching and my students learning I felt like it was a great learning activity that was aligned to standards. The school chose the standard of 2.5 Engages learners in developing and monitoring goals for their own learning and behavior. They chose this standard because we started a new class that was called Soar60 in which the students had 60 minutes to have lunch and do whatever they needed 4 days a week and one day a week they would go to an advisory where the teacher would monitor students grades and mentor students.  We had professional development on this and while I do think it had a positive impact on the student learning I don’t think it was quite as effective a learning activity and the one that i selected mostly because it wasn’t as relevant to my teaching or content.