Discovering recipes for professional learning success

June 2025 | The Learning Professional

Scaling up successful professional learning efforts can help ensure that all students experience the benefits of strong instruction. Unfortunately, initiatives with positive results in one setting can fall short in new contexts with different conditions.”

In a new piece for The Learning Professional, Rebecca Taylor-Perryman and Ariana Audisio explore new ways the K-12 education sector can work to identify bright spots and make them spread.

The ability to make strategic decisions on how to design professional learning with less than ideal conditions is more important than ever. Impactful professional learning must not be rare or restricted to systems with the resources to achieve optimal conditions.

That’s why Taylor-Perryman, Audisio, and the Leading Educators research team are pioneering new research methods known as qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to shed light on how critical design factors affect a professional learning program’s impact on student success. They write:

Traditional evaluation primarily tells us whether an intervention worked but is less suited to explaining how or why. Consider the example of a train-the-trainer model for a new curriculum. In a set of schools that have opted in and have reserved time during the school day for adult learning, teacher practices and student outcomes improved.

But in another set of schools without those conditions, student outcomes did not improve. Are educator buy-in and protected time during the school day responsible for the difference? Are there other combinations of conditions that could work equally well?”

By using comparison groups, coding qualitative conditions or design factors, and looking for patterns across 20+ cases of programs that accomplished improvements in student learning, Taylor-Perryman and Audisio hope to accelerate learning across the sector.