Disrupting the One-And-Done Teacher Professional Development Approach

Much as been written about the flaws of traditional, one-size-fits-all professional teacher development. Every year, $18 billion is spent nationally on professional development programs that fail to substantially impact teacher performance or student outcomes. Thankfully, field knowledge about better alternatives is building.

• Effective, ongoing professional learning for educators on the standards they are expected to meet is a core ingredient for a nimble, change-ready system where teachers and students thrive. This isn’t theoretical. It’s the work we have been doing alongside visionary districts for 13+ years.
• At a time when the demands of the next workforce, building a sustainable life, and civic participation are rapidly evolving, professional learning is a commitment to creating opportunity and helping educators realize the full potential of their life-changing jobs.

Recognizing that professional development is essential and that the resources devoted to it are finite, it’s important to ensure the structure, dosage, focus, and design are likely to result in more standards-aligned practice and accelerate learning for students. Moreover, professional learning is also essential for district staff and instructional leaders who play a key role in the design, sequencing, and uptake of systemic instructional reform efforts.

In this blog, we unpack our Focused Professional Learning enabling condition with a practical example from the coastal lands of Charleston County, South Carolina.

Professional Learning as a lever for System Improvement

Key elements and resources are needed at the school and system levels to produce high-impact teaching and learning. We call these the conditions. Prioritized professional learning time is one of these levers, with collaborative learning time as a cornerstone.

Traditionally, teaching has been carried out in isolation, with educators working within “egg crate” models that limit opportunities for cross-pollination of knowledge among peers. This outdated approach hinders the collective growth of educators and, consequently, leads to variable student experiences across classrooms.

When teachers address grade-level learning expectations in vastly different ways with varying skill levels from classroom to classroom, students’ success is left to chance.

Alternatively, prioritizing ongoing and focused learning time for educators at all points in their careers on the standards they are expected to teach makes continuous growth a design feature of the job. Teacher learning depends on an intentional balance of features, formats, and content.

Pioneering a Better Model in Charleston

In 2019, Charleston County School District’s Acceleration Schools—a set of schools on the state improvement list—needed significant support. Now, after new investments in highly rated curricula and connected professional learning, they are outperforming their pre-pandemic learning and outpacing the district’s overall growth.

Over four years, Leading Educators has partnered with CCSD to bolster teacher knowledge and skill in math and English language arts through recurring school-based learning sequences that take educators through a cycle of shared learning, collaborative planning, and reflection on teaching and learning evidence.

Traditional professional development workshops on broad skills and strategies rarely have a measurable impact on student learning. The same is true for short-term “unboxing” PD like the sessions often provided by curriculum developers after purchase because of the limited attention to developing content knowledge and sharpening practices.

The curriculum-based professional learning model, instead, is backward-designed to strengthen overall system effectiveness from the classroom up to senior leadership by building shared knowledge and practices around the demands of a rigorous and joyful instructional vision. When successful, it leads to greater predictability around what students will experience and what will be true if they are supported to master learning objectives.

In Charleston, we have helped teachers practice content-specific skills aligned to high-quality instructional materials arranged in a coherent year-long arc. These vary by content and grade band and are decided in collaboration with the district based on the curriculum, vision for effective math/ELA instruction, and trends in classroom data.

Each grade band is focused on four specific skills per year, one per quarter. The “content cycle” follows a three-step process that covers shared learning, collaborative lesson planning and practice, and analysis of student learning.

• ⚡ Key insight: The lesson planning and practice stage tends to be the most significant shift for educators. They practice snapshots of an upcoming lesson, with their peers playing the role of students, to anticipate misconceptions, stamp the necessary prior knowledge, try out new instructional moves, and test the pacing.
• 🌱 Why: This allows educators to work toward their best version of a lesson before students experience it.

Each quarterly cycle is aligned to an indicator of what will be observed in classrooms as a result of professional learning. Past indicators have focused on skills such as:

1. Aligning instruction to the appropriate aspect of rigor and the standards
2. Providing supports that encourage students to use academic vocabulary to explain their thinking and demonstrate learning
3. Creating conditions where students are engaged in deep discussion with each other to deepen their understanding and consider other perspectives
4. Checking for understanding to surface and address misconceptions
5. Scaffolding questions that lead students to deepen their knowledge and understanding

⚡Bottom Line: These content-specific sessions aim to help teachers reach and engage all of their students, resulting in greater opportunity for Charleston’s students.

Getting Started

You might be wondering how to prioritize robust professional learning when time is a limited resource. Alisha Watts Burr, a Senior Director for our Charleston partnership, offers three suggestions:

• Determine key stakeholders, such as instructional coaches, who can act as catalysts for change. Then, focus on building capacity (facilitation skills, knowledge of effective professional learning principles, content knowledge, etc.) in these stakeholders to drive change close to the classroom.
• Invest in high-quality curricular materials that will support teachers in delivering consistent grade-level, standards-aligned instruction for all students. This will also reduce the time educators spend searching for instructional materials.
• Streamline efforts by concentrating on one key area of instructional improvement (e.g., using questions to increase student engagement) per quarter. Align professional learning and evaluation to the focus area. 

As you reflect on what it will take to create a more coherent professional learning system in your context, consider the following questions: 

• How well do our professional learning initiatives align with other instructional improvement priorities to avoid “one-off” approaches?
• How effectively do our professional learning efforts meet specific content and curriculum needs?
• Are school teams engaged in an evidence-based learning cycle that includes collaborative learning, instructional planning, and reflection on teaching and learning evidence? If not, what are the barriers?
• Are teachers and leaders developing skills to integrate rigorous academic content, student well-being support, and inclusive practices?
• How well do we connect system-level learning with school-level needs, creating an integrated development system?

Get Support

As a founding member of the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL), we’re determined to help school systems implement the evidence base in practical ways. We’re also proud to have been vetted providers in the Professional Learning Partner Guide since its first issue.

Ready to supercharge your professional learning strategy? Let’s chat about your goals for next year.