What makes teacher professional development stick? Researchers say it’s not the frequency, but rather the ability to learn new curriculum, standards, and instructional methods and practices in a way that enables them to collaborate, iterate, see what worked and get feedback for ongoing improvement.
Elaine Allensworth, a research professor at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, has studied academic gains following professional development for Chicago Public Schools’ implementation of Common Core State Standards in mathematics as well as the district’s Skyline curriculum based on the science of reading.
“Both of these initiatives aimed at the introduction of new materials and changing the practices teachers were engaged in,” she said. “Practices are often hard to change, but they seem to matter a lot, maybe more than the content.”
The “Good to Great Development Program” offered by nonprofit TNTP provides a cycle of educator practice, feedback, observation and refinement of practice, wrote Lara Ohanian, partner for emerging services and innovation, in an email to K-12 Dive.
“Teachers engage with the same challenging content and learning experiences they want students to experience, practice new approaches in authentic settings (with their students!), receive feedback, and collaborate with peers around evidence of student learning,” she said.
In both CPS studies, Allensworth said, students — especially those who struggled — saw notable improvements in test scores and grades after the implementation of professional development.
“School-based professional learning seemed to be a critical component,” she said. “Having time to collaborate and work on changing instructional practices and get support from peers … was really, really critical.”
Both curricular changes were aimed at bringing about student-centered instruction with an emphasis on higher-order analytical skills, while the Skyline piece also aimed to be more culturally responsive with appropriate embedded resources and aligned assessments, Allensworth said.
“It took time for teachers to experiment, try new things, learn from them, and then see what worked and get feedback,” she said. “Having those colleagues they could collaborate with and learn from made a big difference.”
For the Common Core effort, two teacher leaders from each school attended training where they learned to use the new materials and enact the practices, which they then brought back to gain a deeper understanding through implementation, Allensworth said.
“Then, when they were successful, they would try to bring in other teachers in the school, to support them in adopting changes in their practices,” she said. “It’s that collaboration with knowledgeable colleagues who would understand what the change in instructional practice would look like.”
Implementing new curricula with fidelity doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is doing it the exact same way — it depends on the strengths of the teacher and the students, Allensworth said. “There’s teacher discretion there,” she said. “That’s different from how people have thought about it in the past.”
A more recent study that looked at online-only PD found engagement was lower, and teachers did not feel it was as helpful, Allensworth said.
“People are saying it’s very easy to reach lots of people at once doing online workshops,” she said. “We did not see that that was as helpful. It’s very tempting to do that, because you can reach so many people at once.”
TNTP’s research has found that schools that have experienced strong student growth had more coherence around shared expectations, aligned materials and common instructional priorities, not simply more initiatives, Ohanian said.
“In those schools, professional learning was not separate from teaching; it was embedded with a larger instructional system,” she said. “Effective PD must attend to the ‘how’ of adult learning with the same rigor we apply to the ‘how’ of student learning.”
Professional learning that’s generic, decontextualized and disconnected from classroom practice and treats skill development as an “add-on” won’t last, Ohanian added.
“Professional learning is most effective when it is part of everyday teaching and learning, rather than an event that happens outside of it,” she said.
