Jenna Davis handed papers over to two kindergarten teachers of English learners. The English-learner coach at Nashville’s Mt. View Elementary School wanted them to record their reflections on what was going well in the classes they co-lead with other teachers and what they should adjust for next semester.
“I haven’t got a good rhythm,” teacher Glenda McKinney said at that Dec. 5 meeting of her working relationship with her co-teacher.
McKinney and 12 of her Mt. View colleagues who specialize in helping English learners master the English language have been part of a shift the Nashville district made a few years ago to a co-teaching model, in which teachers of English learners team up in the same classroom with general education colleagues. The change, which has happened in some of Nashville’s schools, is meant to enforce the idea that all teachers are responsible for teaching English learners, who now account for 60% of the district’s 81,000 students.
The gen ed teacher provides the academic-content expertise in these classroom teams, and an English-learner teacher provides the language-development expertise. But it takes a lot of effort to get those working relationships right—and training on its own isn’t enough.
Enter Davis, who coaches English-learner teachers like McKinney who work in classrooms with gen ed colleagues.
What Davis does encapsulates many elements of what research has shown makes professional development effective—for any teacher, not only those working with English learners. As a coach, she provides continuous feedback to help teachers improve and reinforce lessons from their training. She facilitates professional learning communities, or PLCs, in which teachers work together to solve common problems they’re facing—not theoretical problems dreamed up in a training curriculum. And Davis is present at the school throughout the year, not delivering a workshop one day and gone the next.
Davis’ role is part of the Metro Nashville district’s broader investment in making sure professional development sticks, especially when it comes to supporting the growing English-learner population. While English-learner coaches work with gen ed teachers, too, the district also has literacy and numeracy coaches as well as instructional coaches for different content areas.
More often, U.S. schools don’t rely on in-house coaches to provide follow-up and feedback on how teachers are implementing lessons from professional development. Instead, PD is often a one-and-done deal.
“Sit-and-get professional development doesn’t work. We’ve known that for a long time,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, the chief knowledge officer and former CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit research firm on education policy and practice.
Professional development requires feedback and follow-up to stick
Research on effective professional development for teachers points to the value of models in which teachers collaborate with coaches and colleagues on planning lessons, designing curriculum, and more, said Darling-Hammond, who is also the California state board of education president and an emeritus professor at Stanford University’s graduate school of education. In other words, the lessons PD imparts are modeled, actionable, and relevant to teachers’ day-to-day work.
“If teachers are collaborating on planning, and there are teachers in that team who have greater expertise, they then are sharing it with the other teachers, and they can work out ways to observe reciprocally, see each other teach in the classroom and organize the sharing of knowledge,” she said.
Coaching and collaboration have become more common facets of professional development over time, but traditional workshops without much follow-up are still common.
In an EdWeek Research Center survey of 876 educators conducted online from Feb. 12 to March 17, participants said workshops led by district leaders or outside presenters were the most common forms of professional development their district or school used. Designated collaboration time among teachers and instructional coaches ranked third and fourth, respectively.
More than half of educators in the nationally representative survey, 54%, said their supervisor never or rarely followed up on the impact of professional development provided to them to try and determine its impact.
About a third of respondents said PD they received in the last year was very or somewhat irrelevant to their job. Of those who said it wasn’t always relevant, the top reason they gave was there’s little or no follow-up, making it effectively “one-and-done” training (48%). Forty-four percent said the PD is unrelated to the real challenges they face.
“Professional development is only effective to the extent it is implemented with follow-up and follow-through from management. It entails management leading by example and holding themselves accountable in order to hold others accountable,” one survey participant wrote in an open-ended response.
In a separate survey conducted in March by the EdWeek Research Center of more than 1,100 educators working with English learners, educators across the country spoke of the need for more training or PD, especially for gen. ed. teachers, on how to teach language development in mainstream classrooms and better support English learners.
DATA SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center nationally representative February-March 2026 survey of 113 district leaders, 112 school leaders, and 651 teachers
PD didn’t stick until coaches provided feedback and follow-up
The Nashville district found itself with the same professional development need over a decade ago as its population of English learners rapidly grew. The district at first invested in getting more of its teachers certified to work as English-learner teachers, said Molly Hegwood, the district’s executive director of English learners.
Then in 2011, the district created a role called English-learner consultant, which supported classroom teachers almost as an aide working with the English learners in their rooms.
In 2013, that position changed to EL coach, with a heavier focus on providing feedback on teaching and learning.
“The word ‘consultant’ was not leading to the coaching and feedback sessions that needed to happen,” Hegwood said.
Today, English-learner coaches across the district work with English-learner teachers on content and language integration. They observe, plan, and give feedback. The coaches receive their own ongoing professional development on adult learning to hone their coaching skills, Hegwood said.
In her time working as a teacher of English learners, Davis said, gaining a building-level, English-learner coach represented a turning point. Before then, the learning on how to teach English learners didn’t really stick. Then, the coach started to lead monthly professional learning communities and work with teachers individually to provide tailored, ongoing feedback.
“That’s where I truly learned to grow as a teacher of multilingual learners … because I had that support provided to me,” Davis said.
District investments in effective PD pay off
Today, Davis coaches 13 full-time English-learner teachers on co-teaching in gen ed classrooms and working with English learners in language-intervention blocks.
As the dean of instruction, she’s also Mt. View Elementary’s multitiered system of supports lead for academics, working with teachers and data to determine which students might need academic intervention to learn literacy or numeracy.
She reviews students’ academic and linguistic data with teachers and helps them set goals not just for their students but for themselves as educators. She gives teachers tips on strategies to use, then follows up with them afterward to see how they’ve done implementing them in their classrooms.
The district used to rely heavily on one-day professional development, sending teachers back to the classroom with new insights but limited follow-up, Hegwood said.
While teachers still attend some one-time sessions during the school year, most professional development that teachers participate in now takes place at their schools. Colleagues study, learn, and problem-solve together, then coaches provide feedback and observations.
“We’ve shifted away from trying to get every single person to attend a contract PD to building up individuals across the district to redeliver [lessons from PD], so that’s really cut down costs for us in the sense of contracting professional development,” Hegwood said.
One benefit from this investment in district- and school-level coaches has been the development of internal expertise, Hegwood said.
“In the long haul, if you don’t invest in the expertise of teachers, … you’re going to have less effective outcomes, then have to spend a lot of other money to make up for the fact that you didn’t do the most effective teaching you could have done,” Darling-Hammond said.
DATA SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center nationally representative February-March 2026 survey of 113 district leaders, 112 school leaders, and 651 teachers
Effective PD calls for continuous improvement
This tailored approach to PD—with teachers receiving training in skills they need to improve on, often indicated by student-assessment data, coupled with feedback and follow-up from coaches like Davis—has led to teachers implementing more best practices, Davis said.
One example: English learners take language-proficiency tests in the spring. For years, Davis has imparted to teachers the importance of slowly introducing students to the test format as early as August to prevent logistical, test-taking challenges later on.
Thanks to her coaching, more teachers are taking her advice and find themselves able to focus more throughout the year on students’ actual language development rather than devoting substantial blocks of time to testing tips.
The reason the practice has caught on is because Davis has kept working with the same teachers, reinforcing her message and offering feedback, she said.
“I’m not a consultant. I didn’t just do my PD, tell some jokes, and then leave,” Davis said. “I’m able to come back and say, ‘OK, we went through XYZ together. Where’s the evidence of that?’”
