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Every educator is familiar with professional learning — although historically, this has often meant workshops after school, expert-led seminars and going to conferences. In recent years, the focus has shifted away from putting in hours, and toward learning experiences that demonstrably improve teaching and learning.
So what differentiates effective professional learning from that which isn’t?
Supporting professional growth among your educators is a critical part of providing an outstanding educational experience to every student. But take a moment to reflect on professional development workshops you’ve been a part of throughout your career in education. Were they one-size-fits-all? Did they take place once in a blue moon? If these jog a memory, it’s likely the PD wasn’t very effective, and it probably didn’t make much of an impact in the classroom.
Professional development requires more than one-stop workshops, classroom observations, or offering feedback forms. It must be intentional. The recipe for true growth begins with an individualized learning process — one that gives educators a voice and choice, identifies strengths and areas for improvement, and promotes a collaborative learning culture.
In this piece, we’ll discuss the national landscape of professional development, best practices for an effective professional development program, resources for getting started, and more.
“Every great student deserves a great teacher, not by chance, but by design.”
- Fisher, Frey, Hattie, 2016
Before we get into the nitty gritty of K-12 professional development, let’s take a look at where it started and how it’s evolved over time.
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How the language around professional learning has evolved over time
Every educator is familiar with professional learning — although historically, this has often meant workshops after school, expert-led seminars and going to conferences. In recent years, the focus has shifted away from putting in hours, and toward learning experiences that demonstrably improve teaching and learning. So what differentiates effective professional learning from that which isn’t?
A quick and easy (we promise) legal primer provides some helpful context…
In 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced No Child Left Behind as the most recent reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The law enacts a shift from specific regulation of what is done in K12 to a standard for how it is done, leaving schools with more programmatic and fiscal flexibility and purporting a broader idea of academic success. With implementation resting squarely on their own shoulders, school districts have both the exciting opportunity and the weighty responsibility to make changes that truly work for them.
One area addressed by ESSA holds particular scope for effective change: professional learning (PL), or professional development (PD). ESSA lays out specific criteria for what effective professional learning looks like, but district leaders decide what they want to accomplish and must set out to make it happen.
According to ESSA, professional development is described as the activities that:
“(A) are an integral part of school and local educational agency strategies for providing educators with the knowledge and skills necessary to enable students to succeed in a well-rounded education and to meet the challenging State academic standards; and...
“(B) are sustained, intensive, collaborative, job-embedded, data-driven, and classroom-focused.”
[S.1177, §8002 (42)]
You’re likely already familiar with ESSA’s six standards for professional development, but for a refresher, it’s worth revisiting. The following definitions were defined by the Frontline Research & Learning Institute, and although your district may have differing definitions, the most important thing is that you have an aligned view amongst your department.
Sustained
Taking place over an extended period; longer than one day or a one-time workshop.
Intensive
Focused on a discreet concept, practice or program.
Collaborative
Involving multiple educators, educators and coaches or set of participants grappling with the same concept or practice and in which participants work together to achieve shared understanding.
Job-embedded
A part of the ongoing, regular work of instruction and related to teaching and learning taking place in real time in the teaching and learning environment.
Data-driven
Based upon and responsive to real time information about the needs of participants and their students.
Classroom-focused
Related to the practices taking place during the teaching process and relevant to instructional process.
Ineffective vs Effective PD With ESSA
Much (if not most) of the professional development offered today still leans toward the ineffective side of the spectrum. The Frontline Research & Learning Institute recently published “Bridging the Gap,” a look at how professional development activities measured up to the criteria set forth in ESSA. While learning opportunities met some criteria more often, such as “classroom-focused” and “job-embedded,” other targets were frequently missed. Overall, less than 20% off district professional learning activities meet ESSA’s federal criteria.
According to the Frontline Research & Learning Institute’s national 2022 findings, school districts only met the standards (on average) as follows:
Sustained5.5%
Intensive4.25 hours
Collaborative7.3%
Job-embedded57%
Data-driven7%
Classroom-focused72%
What are the excuses that are keeping us from reaching the goal?
For many districts, this probably isn’t the case. Consider:
Maybe. But there is a direct connection between setting priorities and finding time. Is implementing sustainable job-embedded professional learning a priority in your organization?
Very possibly. That same report on professionally related absences found that 43% of school administrators say that interdepartmental collaboration is rare — or nonexistent — in developing more effective means for facilitating professional development. Another 38% indicated some collaboration. Only 19% of school administrators indicated that there was heavy interdepartmental collaboration towards effective professional learning.
Probably. Everything we know about reaching difficult goals begins with first taking small, successful steps. Success breeds more success. Small, measurable accomplishments can help garner support from others, free up resources and even rearrange priorities.
These excuses — and probably many more — prevent the implementation of proven effective professional learning designs. They inhibit truly engaging teachers, supporting their ongoing growth and impacting student outcomes. Even worse, they may lead to frustration, ineffectiveness, teacher retention problems and even a culture of apathy.
Before diving into best practices, it’s important to understand what the current landscape of K-12 professional learning looks like. Why? Because understanding this foundation and working off of these building blocks will ultimately help drive a highly effective professional development program.
In a recent webinar, Frontline Education joined EdWeek and Learning Forward to discuss the current trends and national landscape of professional development in the United States.
Here are three key major takeaways as outlined by Learning Forward’s Chief Learning Officer, Paul Fleming:
According to recent research from Vanderbilt University and Jason Grissom, high quality principals can contribute nearly 3 months of additional math and reading learning for students in their schools. “The principal makes it more likely the student gets the exposure to strong teaching’. This may also be driven by principals “engaging in instructionally focused interactions with teachers” and “facilitating productive collaboration and professional learning communities.”
Learning Forward identified that there is an “increasing interest and responsibility to use evidence based professional learning models and strategies to support educator growth and performance.”
Every student should have access to high quality learning. According to Learning Forward, “the current global crisis lays bare the long-standing structural and societal inequities that are barriers to high-quality teaching and learning for all children.”
PD Fast Facts
[WEBINAR]
Interested in watching the full on-demand webinar or downloading the presentation deck?
As educators seek to refine practices and improve student achievement, it is important for educational leaders to provide access to high-quality professional development that offers a timely response to individual needs. Each learning opportunity should demand thoughtful consideration to ensure it is the most appropriate option to support teacher growth.
Leaders should analyze situations, collaborate with key stakeholders, and evaluate anticipated results. Just as it is crucial for teachers in the classroom to engage in self-reflective practice, it is also important for those who organize professional development. The key question to answer: do the offerings provided truly meet the needs of teachers and staff?
You likely already have ESSA’s standards for professional development locked in, but there are other strategies that can support your efforts. Below are five things to enact and five things to avoid in order to ensure your district’s professional development meets the needs of your entire school community: teachers, staff, and students alike.
Professional learning shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. Note the importance of providing learning opportunities that address teacher’s individual unique needs. Giving teachers a voice in their learning will help to promote their agency and growth.
According to NEA, 20% of teachers “indicate that they have no input in their professional development”
Do you use the term “data-driven” to describe effective professional learning? When proposing PD activities, teachers should identify how those activities align to the district’s strategic action plan in order to receive credit for them. Then, following each activity, require teachers to submit feedback.
Teachers aren’t the only educators in a school district. Bus drivers, monitors, security officers, cafeteria workers – they all play a significant role in K12 education. Certified and non-certified staff should pursue excellence and growth through professional learning. Afterall, you never know where your next great educator will come from!
“The most important thing about talent development is that all employees need to feel valued, they need to be respected and their voices need to matter. The more we invest in them, the more payback the school system gets, and the more productive our operations are.”
- Mark Benigni, Meriden Public Schools
Put on your forward-thinking goggles and view teacher observations as opportunities to collaboratively work toward greater teaching practice. Observations can also help districts understand if and how well teachers are implementing new practices, whether there are barriers to implementation, and what might be getting in their way.
The work doesn’t stop once a teacher completes their learning activity. Actively work with teachers to ensure that professional development for teachers makes a difference in their classroom.
“I’m not evaluating you and your knowledge after having taken this course. I want to know, ‘Did this course have a change on your practice? Did it have any impact on student learning? What’s the evidence you have on the student learning piece?’”
- Marguerite Dimgba, Director of Professional Learning, Greece Central
Engaging, collaborative, and relevant learning opportunities represent the best of what professional learning can do for teacher growth. But…there’s also a flip side. Everyone decries those stay-for-two-hours-after-school-and-sit-in-a-large-room-and-passively-listen workshops. Still, most teachers are quite familiar with well-intentioned learning experiences that fail to address their needs. When it comes to implementing a professional development strategy in your district, these are the top six things to avoid:
Teachers are the “boots on the ground” in your school district. More than anyone, they have their finger on the pulse of the student body, they look at the data and know the student needs in their particular building, and they know the areas where they need to grow as educators.
Professional development is often more about connecting resources and enabling teacher-driven professional growth than about telling people what their PD should look like. And not only each teacher, but each building likely has different needs as well. The larger the district, the more important it is to take a targeted approach to professional learning.
Consider asking every school to provide a certain number of hours of professional learning per month. This can take the form of faculty meetings, PLCs, after-school professional development and full faculty in-service days, as well as instructional coaching.
Giving schools this responsibility can also contribute to each building’s autonomy, especially if instructional leadership teams that are comprised of teachers are tasked with planning learning opportunities that teachers want, need and request.
“If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”
- Zig Ziglar
Backward design isn’t a new concept for you. What are your desired outcomes? Student achievement is probably at the top of your list. And while teacher quality correlates to student outcomes and sets the stage for students to thrive, in professional learning it’s better to focus your outcomes on teachers developing specific qualities or capabilities that have been shown to be supportive of student achievement.
Additionally, your district probably already has specific initiatives and desired outcomes. So how do you support these goals as well as offer learning that teachers need and want? One way is to slice up the pie of a teacher’s professional development to give time to each of these. If teachers are responsible for participating in 30 hours of PD each year, you might consider setting guidelines like this:
Anyone who is close to a teacher has seen the demands of the job. Educators are already working long hours, grading papers at night and planning lessons for the next day. Even when teachers are fully invested in professional learning opportunities, it’s critical to offer valuable learning that is applicable to their classroom immediately.
Professional learning that’s not relevant to what teachers face here/now/tomorrow/this week? That can simply be overwhelming.
It’s vital to make it simple for teachers to craft their own professional learning plans to help them meet their defined goals and address their needs. Online professional learning management systems can provide catalogs of filtered professional learning opportunities, allow teachers to give feedback on what they’ve learned, and reflect on their learning and craft action plans. Districts can use all of this information to help determine what professional learning opportunities to offer in the future, and tailor already in-progress learning experiences to maximize learning.
[PODCAST]
Want to know if your PD is or isn’t working?
There are many ways districts choose to offer professional learning, and in no way is this list comprehensive. But as technology continues to advance the ways in which it’s possible to learn, as well as to bring people togetherto learn, here are a few different models, both traditional and not-so-traditional.
Though school districts in our country spend approximately $18 billion dollars on professional development each year, the vast majority of it is delivered using traditional “in-service” experiences, which studies have shown yield little results for the participating teachers.
There are many reasons for this scarcity of impact, but one of the most obvious is the lack of personalization of in-service experiences. When large groups of faculty are brought together to participate in a single event, many in attendance will find that the event is not a good use of their time.
Let’s examine an example to highlight why this is an issue.
If the faculty of a school are gathered to discuss classroom management techniques, experienced teachers will likely mentally check out; they couldn’t have handled classrooms for a decade if they hadn’t already developed effective classroom management techniques. For those faculty, a focus on educational technology, student diversity (English Language Learners and students with special needs) or changing standards would likely be a better use of their time.
But inexperienced teachersdoneed the classroom management development. They might not be ready to focus on educational technology (or may already have proficiency in that area), or student diversity, or standards which haven’t “changed” for them because they are new anyway.
So why persist in using in-service workshops as a major form of professional development delivery for our educators?
Most education experts who have focused on teacher effectiveness agree that teacher collaboration has a significant impact on teacher improvement. The benefit of bringing more- and less-experienced faculty together has been demonstrated through research, and most teachers will cite the influence of mentors as a major factor in the formation of the skills and techniques that have helped them to achieve success.
It is clear why the addition of online professional development opportunities, whether asynchronous (self-paced) modules or synchronous webinars, could be seen as a solution to the question of how to provide personalized professional development opportunities for faculty.
If participants do not have to attend at the same time and place, they can seek out the opportunities they believe are the most important to their own improvement and success.
They can even be provided with opportunities based upon their own personal observation results. Just as educators are working to better differentiate learning experiences for our students, district leaders can do the same for their educators, who are also lifelong learners.
However, it is also clear that such targeted professional development resources, despite the fact that they allow for the personalization and targeting, could be seen as less collaborative.
One emerging solution to help provide professional development that is both targeted and collaborative is to leverage online professional development using a “flipped model, just like with students in the classroom. How would this work?
Teachers can engage in professional development online and at their own pace. They select the topics of interest to them, those identified by observation as being useful or topics that are selected by a specific but relevant group such as their department or cohort (for example, math department, new teachers).
After engaging with the content, educators will meet in professional learning communities. PLCs can be online or in person, but when they are structured so that they are within the same school or district, they will be most useful because the local details will be consistent: the student body, the environment, the grade level or department.
The more natural connection there is between the teachers, the more discussions will lead to the application of skills.
Whatever model you end up implementing in your district (or maybe it’s a mix of all three!), here are some additional ideas to supplement your efforts.
Many schools have found that mentoring programs for new or struggling teachers can reduce turnover. So why not create a mentoring program for non-certified employees? A mentor can provide individualized support, encourage learning, and improve performance.
Learning lunches are an opportunity to sit down with your classified staff and go over training topics that can be covered in a relatively short amount of time. The face-to-face contact is great for discussions and questions and eating as a group can foster a sense of community
With best practices and creative ideas in your pocket, the next step to implementing a comprehensive, individualized learning program is to think about how you’re going to measure the effectiveness of each standard. The two most important aspects of measuring standards are identifying key metrics and benchmarking those metrics to guarantee continuous growth and improvement within your organization. Let’s take a look!
Keep in mind, no matter what set of metrics your district uses, it’s important to ensure they come from easily-accessible data that’s available in your professional learning management system. Afterall, you don’t want to measure something that takes a massive amount of time, resources, or effort to tell if your PD is on track or off track.
Here are some ideas for key metrics rooted in data to measure your program’s effectiveness on staff learning and student achievement:
Activity enrollments consisting of more than 3 meetings
Average length of PD (in hours)
Enrollment in an activity with a collaborative format
Activities offered within the school system
Activities offered aligned to a data-driven format
Activities aligned with classroom-focused InTASC standards
What you can you do with these metrics to measure effectiveness? Check out these visual graphics below to help determine not only where you are today with your professional learning program, but to also help you set a goal for where you want to be moving forward. Whatever the case, it’s critical to measure your district’s trends over time and to benchmark your district’s results against national results.
And once you’ve input metrics, your goal, and the national benchmark, you will be on track toward effectively measuring your district’s professional development progress:
[PLAYBOOK]
Designing High-Quality Professional Development Programs
Providing effective professional learning isn't easy. There's a reason so many educators hold graduate-level degrees. Teaching and learning are as complex as they are rewarding. And the stakes are never higher than when it comes to supporting and promoting teachers as they continually stretch toward excellence.
Every leader in K-12 wants students to have the best teachers possible (of course!). It’s why so many school systems place such an emphasis on professional learning, on growth-focused evaluations, on promoting coaching and peer collaboration. But supporting teacher growth at scale isn’t easy. Every school is different, and every teacher has his or her own areas of strength and areas for growth. States have divergent requirements for professional learning and teacher evaluations.
Here are four districts that display impressive innovation in professional learning, and what their Directors of Professional Learning have to say about their respective programs:
Jenks, OK | Mary Katherine Moeller, Director of Professional Development
Mary Kathryn and the rest of the team at Jenks Public Schools work hard to be intentional when introducing new initiatives. They don’t shy away from taking risksand exploring innovation — but they want to be wise about it.
“That’s really been our process... because our teachers are very busy, and they’re pulled in lots of directions. We want to be really intentional before we introduce something new or ask them to make a shift or a change.”
Greece, NY | Marguerite Dimgba, Director of Professional Learning
The work doesn’t stop once a teacher completes a learning activity. Greece Central actively works with teachers to ensure that professional development for teachers makes a difference in the classroom.
“I’m not evaluating you and your knowledge after having taken this course. I want to know, ‘Did this course have a change on your practice? Did it have any impact on student learning? What’s the evidence you have on the student learning piece?’ ... That sort of changed our thinking in terms of evaluating professional learning, so that’s really been a positive.”
Virginia Beach, VA | Janene Gorham, Ed.D., Director of Teacher Leading & Learning
Virginia Beach has introduced a competency-based model of professional development. This allows teachers to move at their own pace and helps increase teacher buy-in as they can choose learning opportunities to develop the skills they need.
“We’ve created a flexible system that allows [teachers] to go about setting their learning goals and acquire those hours in a variety of way... The teacher obviously has his or her own interests and priorities..”
Bucks County, PA | Ann Bell, Director of Professional Growth
Council Rock provides professional learning that is heavily focused on collaboration, reflection, and accessibility. With self-paced courses, teachers can access their PD programs at different times.
“We can provide professional learning opportunities which can be addresses in more of an on-demand style for our teachers who don’t have the time to be out of the classroom or have attend after school events.”
[CASE STUDY]
Check out the full spotlight on Council Rock School District for more insight and ideas on creating a culture of growth
Now that you have the right strategies and best practices for implementing an individualized, comprehensive professional development program, check out these three different types of professional learning tools to support your organization’s efforts:
Provide personalized professional learning for teachers
Conduct growth-focused evaluations for teachers
Equip staff to become masters of their craft
Looking Ahead to Next Year: 5 Tips for Evaluating Your PD Program
When looking for potential professional growth tools with vendors, keep in mind… not all of them are created equal. Here are 10 questions to ask vendors about their professional management software:
Want a printable version of this buyer’s guide? Download here
Ready to better support continuous educator improvement with individualized professional learning? Frontline Professional Growth can help!
Over 2,000 districts use Frontline Professional Growth to streamline evaluations and customize professional learning for teachers.
We partner with leaders in teacher development like Charlotte Danielson and James Strongeto support effective teaching for better student outcomes.
Our solutions are designed to help districts meet the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) mandate to provide professional development that is sustained, intensive, job-embedded, collaborative, data-driven and classroom-focused
