Professional Development: How Do We Know If It Works?
Knowledgeable, skillful teachers form the bedrock of good schools. We all accept the notion that teachers who know and can do more in the classroom help students learn more. So it’s no surprise that funders, educators, and researchers all tout professional development. Teaching teachers appeals to our intuition as a high-leverage strategy for boosting student achievement. But professional development is expensive to provide, hard to find time for, and difficult to do well. Worse, we have very little empirical evidence about how—or even whether—it works. As research, teaching, and funding communities, we need to start holding ourselves to a much higher standard of evidence about the effectiveness for enhancing student learning of professional-development interventions that we support.
Moving to this standard—judging professional development by its effect on student learning—does not mean that we should abruptly call a halt to existing professional development, label it ineffective, and instead embrace scripted curricula that expect little of teachers. Nor does it mean that every professional-development program, forever , will require an expensive research component. What it does mean is that for the next few years, funders and policymakers should make it a priority to build a research base about how and when our investments in professional development work.
School districts spend a lot of money on professional development, often much more than they realize. This spending is scattered among budget categories and funded from multiple sources, many of them outside the district. In a study of five urban districts, Karen Hawley Miles and her colleagues found that spending on professional development—including teacher time, coaching, materials, facilities, tuition, and fees—ranged from 2 percent to more than 5 percent of total district expenditures, averaging more than $4,000 per teacher. Extrapolated to the nation as a whole, these figures suggest that we spend $5 billion to $12 billion on...
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