Nothing elicits a groan from teachers quite like the word “professional development” or “PD.” It conjures images of peppy consultants who spent less than a year in the classroom, state-mandated training videos with all the excitement of a dental waiting room, or a waste of five precious hours just days before the school year begins.
But PD is one of the primary levers for school improvement. Teachers are the personnel who carry out the instruction, after all. Thus, it follows that to substantially improve a school requires improving the quality of the staff.
Unfortunately, the research on PD is rather bleak. Several research reviews from 2007, 2016, and 2019 all came to the same general conclusion: Most effects are neutral, and those that are positive are only modestly so.
In other words, a lot of teacher PD is simply awful. Those 30-minute after school meetings where an admin lectures their staff on the supposed inefficacy of lectures? They are, indeed, an utter waste of time. Just about anything else—heading home early to decompress, half an hour to consult with colleagues, searching for that last bit of belly button lint—would have a better return on investment.
But it doesn’t have to be awful. Reports that pick through the evidence, seeking common elements across effective professional development programs find a number of commonalities: substantial investments in time, high levels of coaching and feedback, and links to specific curriculum.
But effects sizes from researchers and general recommendations from policy analysts are unclear when it comes to actual implementation that administrators in a building have to carry out. How can a principal or instructional coach leverage what we know about time investments or feedback when they walk through the school doors tomorrow?
Allow me to recommend a handful of practical, structural changes about how professional development is delivered based on the research to hopefully lead to better improvements overall.
First and foremost, since effective PD regimes require significant investments of time, it’s imperative that schools focus on the least effective teachers. If you set aside two hours a day for coaching (an optimistic number), that gives any administrator about 260 hours per year. Spread that across a building of teachers, and it’ll be like too little butter spread across too much bread. But focus on four to six teachers—visiting their classrooms every other week—and you could actually effect change.
For everyone else—visiting their classrooms quarterly or once a semester—you can maybe get away with one focus throughout the year. Improve questioning. Streamline classroom procedures. Indeed, many “science of reading” laws incentivize this very approach, requiring all teachers to go through a sustained, focused series of PD sessions over the course of a year.
Conversely, disparate, disconnected, one-off sessions here and there won’t accomplish much. Pick a focus for the year and stick to it.
Second, it would be of much benefit to rely on teacher expertise, not administrators or outside consultants. Effective teacher development programs relied on models and feedback, but they’re agnostic on who provides these models and coaching.
Administrators are like Swiss army knives. They have to be able to do a little bit of everything, but often are not masters of everything. And they don’t have to be. They can and should lean on the expertise of those in their building who are experts on a topic.
Find your experts of classroom management or direct instruction or whatever other topic. Ask for their input on a PD session. What resources do they use? What books do they read? What’s their daily lesson structure? Can they lead a few PD sessions in your stead?
Go a step further. When I had new teachers, I would cover their classes two to three times in the opening weeks so they could observe our best teachers running through a phonics and math lessons. Letting them see the curriculum in action was far more effective than any presentation from me.
To get the most out of it, instead of scheduling a follow-up conversation with me, I also offered to take one of their other duties so the novice and veteran could convene and discuss. The veteran teacher actually working through the curriculum daily will provide far better answers to any questions and also access to curricular materials that you, an administrator, simply cannot.
Finally, regular classroom visits, not rare evaluative observations, are an essential routine that allows for effective discipline, communication, policy modification, and in this case, professional development. Unless you’re regularly observing teachers, you cannot know about the strengths and weaknesses of your staff, whether they’re implementing the approved curriculum, or what you can actually offer them that would be of use.
You’ll begin to notice common instructional deficiencies across the building that can inform practical PD sessions. Neither coaching nor school-wide PD initiatives will accomplish much unless the administrator gets out from behind their desk and gets into the classrooms.
Some of the recommendations here are a bit eccentric. Teachers are unused to administrators visiting their classes for ten minutes weekly. They’re unaccustomed to an assistant principal covering their class so they can observe a colleague teach. But from my own experience and what little research we have, it’s these atypical habits that will improve the quality of instruction in a building, not another lecture pulled together thirty minutes for the Friday afternoon PD.
