Professional Development

By Anthony Rebora

Updated June 29, 2011

Professional development generally refers to ongoing

learning opportunities available to teachers and other
education personnel through their schools and
districts. Effective professional development is often
seen as vital to school success and teacher
satisfaction, but it has also been criticized for its
cost, often vaguely determined goals, and for the
lack of data on resulting teacher and school
improvement that characterizes many efforts.
With schools today facing an array of complex
challenges—from working with an increasingly
diverse population of students, to integrating new
technology in the classroom, to meeting rigorous
academic standards and goals—observers continue to
stress the need for teachers to be able to enhance
and build on their instructional knowledge.
Parsing the strengths and weaknesses of the vast
array of programs that purport to invest in teachers’
knowledge and skills continues to be a challenge.
Today, professional development activities include
formal teacher induction, the credits or degrees
teachers earn as part of recertification or to receive
salary boosts, the national-board-certification
process, and participation in subject-matter
associations or informal networks. (Sawchuk, Nov.
10, 2010a).
Historically, administrators have favored the
workshop approach, in which a district or school
brings in an outside consultant or curriculum expert
on a staff-development day to give teachers a one-
time training seminar on a garden-variety pedagogic
or subject-area topic. Criticized for their lack of
continuity and coherence, workshops have at least in
theory fallen out of favor. The federal No Child Left
Behind Act of 2001, for instance, defines all
professional development funded through the law to
include activities that “are not one-day or short-term
workshops or conferences.” There is little evidence to
suggest that states and districts adhere to this
directive.
Even so, many teachers still appear to receive much
of their professional development through some form
of the one-shot workshop. Survey data from the
National Center for Education Statistics, the most
recent publicly available, show that in the 1999-2000
school year, 95 percent of teachers took part in
workshops or training in the previous 12 months,
compared with 74 percent who reported working in
an instructional group and 42 percent who
participated in peer observation (Broughman, 2006).
The NCES has since conducted two additional
administrations of the SASS, but updated data on
these questions have not yet been made public.
Beginning in the 1990s, qualitative literature began
to support a roughly consistent alternative to the
workshop model of professional development. This
preferred approach holds that for teacher learning to
truly matter, it needs to take place in a more active
and coherent intellectual environment—one in which
ideas can be exchanged and an explicit connection to
the bigger picture of school improvement is made.
This vision holds that professional development
should be sustained, coherent, take place during the
school day and become part of a teacher’s
professional responsibilities, and focus on student
results (Wei, et al, 2009).
A major three-part study by the Stanford Center
for Opportunity Policy in Education, in partnership
with the National Staff Development Council (now
Learning Forward), provides some of the most up-to-
date descriptive information on professional-
development trends in the United States.
The study, released in three phases in 2009 and
2010, drew on a variety of sources, including reviews
of mainly qualitative literature, research on teacher
learning in developed countries, surveys of teachers
conducted by the Learning Forward group, survey
data from the annual MetLife Survey of the American
Teacher, and data from three administrations of the
federal Schools and Staffing Survey. Among other
findings, the reports stated that:
• U.S. teachers generally spent more time instructing
students and less time in professional learning
opportunities with their peers than those in top-
performing countries.
• As of 2008, 78 percent of beginning teachers
reported having had a mentor, though not always in
the teacher's content area, up from 62 percent in
2000.
• The intensity of other types of professional
development decreased between 2004 and 2008.
Training of at least nine to 16 hours on the use of
computers for instruction, reading instruction, and
student discipline all declined notably, while training
of up to eight hours in those areas increased.
Training in content, however, increased during that
time period.
• Teachers in four states—Colorado, Missouri, New
Jersey, and Vermont—reported above-average
participation in professional development. Those
states shared common structures and strategies for
teachers’ on-the-job training.
Several popular models for site-based staff
development matured during the 2000s, including
the now-ubiquitous professional learning
communities, also known as “inquiry teams” or
“learning teams.” In this model, teachers in either
grade-level or content-area teams meet several
times a week to collaborate on teaching strategies
and solve problems. In the most sophisticated
examples, teachers set common instructional goals,
teach lessons in their individual classrooms,
administer informal assessments to determine levels
of student mastery, and then regroup as a team to
analyze the data together. Then, they pinpoint areas
of success, identify areas for improvement, and set
goals for future teaching (Honawar, 2008).
In order to provide enough time for teachers to work
together effectively, such models frequently require
schools to overhaul their schedules or arrange for a
delayed-start time (Sawchuk, Nov. 10, 2010b;
Sawchuk, March 3, 2010).
Such practices can be paired with other opportunities
for deepening practice, including observing fellow
teachers and working one-on-one with classroom-
based “coaches,” or content experts (Keller, 2007).
Other variations of site-based professional
development include the Japanese practice of lesson
study, in which a teacher creates and teaches a
model lesson. The lesson is observed and sometimes
videotaped so that colleagues can analyze the
lesson’s strengths and weaknesses and determine
how to strengthen the lesson (Viadero, 2004).
Hard data on which professional-development models
lead to better teaching are difficult to come by. In
essence, professional development relies on a two-
part transfer of knowledge: It must inculcate in
teachers new knowledge and skills such that they
change their behavior, and those changes must
subsequently result in improved student mastery of
subject matter. Unsurprisingly, the complex nature of
those transactions renders the field of professional
development a challenging one to study. Much of the
research conducted on professional development
continues to be descriptive rather than quantitative
(Sawchuk, Nov. 10, 2010c).
Quantitative research on the impact of professional
development remains comparatively thin. A 2007
review of more than 1,300 studies on professional
development conducted by researchers at the
American Institutes of Research found only nine
studies of professional-development programs that
met rigorous scientific standards set by the What
Works Clearinghouse, the arm of the federal Institute
of Education Sciences that reviews experimental
research on program impact.

On average, the study found, effective programs

were characterized by an average of 49 hours of
training The study’s authors cautioned against
extrapolating the findings given the varying aims of
the programs and the small sample sizes of
participants (Yoon, et al; Sawchuk, Nov. 10, 2010c).
However, two federally funded, randomized
field studies of intensive professional-development
programs found no effects on student achievement,
even though the programs were generally aligned
with the features outlined in the 2007 review. In the
first study, two professional-development approaches
based on a popular early-reading program increased
teachers’ knowledge of literacy development in the
year of the intervention and in their use of explicit
reading instruction, but had little effect on
achievement among 2nd graders in high-poverty
schools (Garet, et al, 2008).
A study looking at a secondary math professional-
development initiative found that it yielded
significant changes in teachers’ instructional practice,
but (with one small exception), it did not improve
teacher knowledge of rational numbers. The
professional development had no impact on middle
school students’ understanding of rational numbers
(Garet, et al, 2011).
As annual student data became prevalent following
the No Child Left Behind Act, some scholars have run
statistical analyses of large sets of these to
determine whether teachers with specific
professional-development experiences get larger
gains for their students than other teachers. Looking
across annual data from Florida between 1999-2000
and 2004-05, one such study found inconsistent, but
generally positive if small, correlations between
content-focused in-service credits in math and
middle school students’ achievement in that subject
(Harris and Sass).
Only a handful of studies have examined newer, site-
based approaches to professional development
through quantitative means. One study concluded
that students in schools whose learning teams relied
on a set of formal protocols for guiding meetings
improved more than those in a comparison group of
schools where that structure was lacking. While this
study relied on a quasi-experimental methodology
rather than a randomized experiment, its findings
could be a promising avenue for future research.
(Gallimore, et al)