What We Know: Professional Development

Research indicates that high quality professional development is essential for high quality teaching. Given the complexity of teaching and learning in today’s schools, high quality professional development is necessary to ensure that all teachers are able to meet the needs of diverse student populations, effectively use data and become active agents in their own professional growth.

Effective professional development:

• Focuses on instruction specific to the teaching setting;
• Is sustained and continuous;
• Provides opportunities for collaboration inside and outside of school;
• Reflects teachers’ ideas about what and how to learn; and
• Helps teachers develop a theoretical understanding of the skills and knowledge they need.[1]

The most effective professional development focuses on the specific content students will learn and the specific difficulties students encounter in learning this content. Therefore, professional development should not focus on generic teaching behaviors, but on the analysis of curriculum and student responses to it. Offering only “in-service” for teachers on new student standards is insufficient to the task at hand. Teachers need vehicles for analysis, criticism and communication of ideas and practices.

Unfortunately, the realities of professional development offerings are often far from the ideal. A 2003 survey of teachers conducted by Public Agenda found that 50 percent of those surveyed reported that the professional development they participate in makes little difference for them as teachers.[2]

In one of the few studies that linked professional development to student achievement, David Cohen and Heather Hill discovered that when teachers were afforded opportunities to learn how to study curricular materials and student work samples their students performed better on standardized achievement tests.[3]

Karen Hawley Miles, President of Education Resource Management Consultants, has noted that for schools to improve professional development and justify financial resources, school leaders and policymakers must:

1. Describe their professional development and improvement activities and investments and show that they are organized strategically.
2. Quantify the cost of each of these.
3. Measure the effects of their investment in terms of changed classroom practice and ultimately student performance.
   

Most districts have yet to study how they spend their professional development resources much less what effect they are having. Hawley-Miles and colleagues have developed unique tools to help policy makers and practitioners better how professional development dollars are being spent and to what end.

A more comprehensive district understanding of professional development resources and resulting impacts is even more essential under No Child Left Behind. NCLB requires states to ensure that all teachers are participating in “high quality” professional development, which is sustained, intensive, classroom-focused, long-term and directly related to helping students meet achievement standards.

A study from the Center for Teaching Quality – which included teacher surveys and school case studies in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama – found that many schools and districts struggle to fund the type of professional development required by NCLB and that rural districts are often at a particular disadvantage due to their small size, limited access to available expertise, and inadequate funding. Researchers found professional development inadequate in several high-needs across the region.

[1] McLaughlin, M. (in press). Communities of Practice and the Work of High School Teaching. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[2] Farkas, S., Johnson, J. Duffett, A., with Moye, L. and Vine, J. (2003). Stand By Me: What Teachers Really Think About Unions, Merit Pay, and Other Professional Matters. Public Agendas p. 43
[3] Cohen, D. and Hill, H. (2001). Learning Policy: When State Education Reform Works . New Haven and London : Yale University Press. pp. 2-3.