“Professional Development” is a loaded term, often being the target of jokes, ridicule, and memes. We know from numerous research and reports, as well as anecdotal experiences, that professional development activities are rarely high-quality and rarely align to the needs of the teachers they serve. Additionally, the only true metric we typically use to measure the effectiveness of professional development is survival - how many participants attended a professional development experience and live through it to receive their certificate. While some schools may collect data on the quality of PD, many schools never fully operationalize that data. An even smaller number of schools will ever customize PD to meet the needs of their teachers or collect data on how PD is changing classroom practice (beyond a compliance measure - are teachers doing the thing that they were told to do as a part of the PD). Compliance doesn’t tend to drive long term changes to practice, as practices begin to fade in cases where there isn’t adequate buy-in and when administrators stop looking for a specific intervention.

Professional Development vs Professional Learning

Recently, many people have been switching from using the term Professional Development instead of Professional Learning. This is not designed to be a replacement term. Professional development is usually a one-shot, one-size-fits-all workshop. By contrast, professional learning refers to the entire experience of workshops, reading, practice, coaching, and support that each teacher needs to support their individual professional growth needs.

In short, professional learning adopts elements of inquiry-based personalized learning discussed in Unit 1, and applies them to teachers.

Theories of Effective Professional Learning

In their 2002 book Student Achievement Through Staff Development, Joyce and Showers examined the impact of professional learning on transfer to practice. After professional learning experiences in different formats, they examined the percentage of participants who were able to demonstrate new knowledge and demonstrate new skills as a result of a professional development experience, and then the percentage of teachers who applied their skills in their professional practice. Their results are summarized below:

In summary, this essentially destroys the idea that a one-shot professional development will have any useful impact on practice, especially if it’s only a “sit-and-get” style workshop.

Darling-Hammond, Hyler, Gardner, and Espinosa (2017) identified the following characteristics of effective professional learning:

• Content-focused: Focused on content and strategies associated with specific curriculum content in classroom contexts, including a focus on discipline-specific curriculum development and pedagogy.
• Incorporates active learning: Teachers are active participants in the workshop, designing and testing strategies, engaging both as a teacher and a learner, creating artifacts, and getting feedback from peers.
• Supports collaboration: Teachers can share ideas and collaborate and job-embedded contexts.
• Uses models of effective practice: Shows examples of best practices and provides teachers with a clear vision of what a resultant product should look like. May include teacher artifacts, videos, etc.
• Provides coaching and expert support: Involves coaching based on best-practices focused directly on individual teacher needs.
• Offers feedback and reflection: Provides teachers with opportunities to reflect and receive feedback on their professional learning, make changes in their practice, and receive feedback again in an ongoing cycle.
• Is of sustained duration: Is not a single workshop. Provides time and space for teachers to practice, implement, reflect, collaborate, receive coaching and support, and do it again.

Clarke and Hollingsworth identify their Interconnected Model of Professional Growth and that growth occurs in three domains that are interconnected: the personal domain (teachers knowledge, beliefs, and practices), the domain of practice (professional experimentation) and the domain of consequence (production of salient outcomes).

In ed-tech circles, this tends to mean that teachers have to understand the purpose and benefits of a new technology (“why is this new thing better?”) and have sufficient time to experiment before they can adopt to practice. Additionally, teachers may have to have time to experiment and adopt a tool for administrative functions (i.e. using Google Docs for lesson planning first) before using it with students.

Guskey (2016) identified five levels of impact data for professional learning:

1. Participant reactions: Did the participants enjoy the experience and find it useful (spoiler: most PD evaluation tends to stop here)?
2. Participant learning: Are participants able to demonstrate learning as a result of this professional learning experience?
3. Organizational support and change: Were changes made in the school as a result of this professional learning experience? This looks at the school-wide outcomes of the PD.
4. Participants use of new knowledge and skills: Beyond organizational level changes, are teachers actually making changes in their individual practice?
5. Student Learning Outcomes: Are the changes being made improving academic and/or non-academic outcomes for students?

Implications for Edtech

The primary function of the ITF is to facilitate the integration of digital-age learning into the instructional program. This means that as an ITF, you’ll be developing a lot of professional learning activities. The research on effective professional learning creates several takeaways for ITFs. First, all training should be ongoing in nature, and focused on the pedagogy of digital learning and not on tools. Tool-focused trainings tend to be largely ineffective since teachers will need to be able to see a need to use a particular tool in their lesson context before they can focus on adoption (the presentation of new tools should be “just-in-time” or shared at the point of need). Small group trainings should introduce digital-age learning pedagogies and the challenges of managing a 1:1 classroom. ITFs should, when possible, follow group trainings with as much coaching as possible, at which point tools can be introduced. There are other ways to share information about both specific tools and pedagogies, such as micro-credentials and gamification, both introduced in this unit.

It’s also important to remember that you’ll be dealing with a diverse set of teachers that will each need individualized supports - from the first year tech savvy teacher with no idea how to manage a classroom to the veteran who is resistant to change to the near-retiree who has a long and storied career of amazing teaching but also can’t use a mouse (and every other combination of experience, and technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPaCK) that you can dream up). That means that whole-group trainings on any topic will be too fast-paced and advanced for some and way too basic for others. Like in a classroom, differentiation and personalization are essential components of effective professional learning, along with sustained coaching and implementation support. This may mean rethinking uses of time - I often hear that teachers don’t prefer after-school PD sessions because you’re keeping teachers late and they’re already tired. Asynchronous activities, check-ins, brown-bags, and other informal meetings can often prove to be much more advantageous.

Assessing Need

The first step to creating a professional learning program for your teachers is to assess their needs. Many ITFs will work in partnership with school leadership and other instructional coaching staff to develop a comprehensive training model, of which technology is a part. This may include an in-depth examination of classroom walkthrough data, teacher self-assessment against a tool like the Technology Integration Matrix or an instructional model, teacher self-assessment around a tool like a curriculum or an unpacking document, surveys like the Panorama Survey or a tool like this one created for teacher self-assessment against the Digital Learning Competencies. The data from these instruments, along with honest conversations around the areas of effectiveness and needs for each teacher and team, can be used to triangulate school-wide needs as well as the needs of individual teachers to begin to develop a comprehensive professional learning program with a personalized track for each teacher.

Especially during COVID-19, many teachers felt left out on their own and professional development was offered and consumed in record numbers. The trainings I was involved with during COVID involved over 30,000 educators - a record for the team at the Friday Institute where I worked. Some schools even gave teachers multiple days or weeks specifically to focus on professioanl learning activities to prepare for remote learning.

Professional Learning Formats

Many of the theories above are focused on large or whole-group professional development sessions. Those types of workshops still have their place, but the key takeaway is that they need to be relevant to teacher practice, ongoing, and they need to promote high engagement. We also need to remember that like kids, teachers have learning preferences and learning needs - a teacher may not be comfortable presenting to their peers in a large group or creating a song or dance to share a concept, etc. Adults are just as easy to disengage as students, and will go to their phones or their grading if they don’t see an activity as valuable (and teachers will be just as overtly disrespectful as any student in those cases). Long story short, you can’t assume anything when you’re working with teachers - you need base your workshops in adult learning theory (andragogy) and make lessons active, relevant, and engaging every time you present. Additionally, professional learning programs should include elements of teacher voice and choice - teachers should be able to identify, based on honest self-assessment and working with their coaches, what supports they need and what professional learning activities can be skipped. In the age of the Internet, many teachers are seeking out resources beyond the school walls, and attending activities like Edcamps (described later in the unit) which need to be valued as a part of a complete professional learning program.