Decades of research suggest engaging, effective teachers are the most important factor in student learning.
But linking ongoing teacher learning to student achievement has proven more difficult.
Now the U.S. Department of Education is doubling down on teacher collaboration—one of the few approaches to teacher professional development backed by both emerging research and the teachers themselves, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, which studies topics of interest to Congress.
In a guidance letter released in February, the Education Department encouraged districts to use their share of the $2.2 billion in federal Title II grants—the largest source of federal funding for teacher professional development—for team-teaching and other staffing models that generally give the most effective teachers more opportunities to share their expertise with colleagues or impact more students.
(At odds with the guidance letter, the Trump administration on Friday released a budget proposal that would eliminate Title II grants for states and collapse them into a smaller block-grant program for states, the second year the administration has proposed such a move.)
Federal support for collaborative teaching could encourage more states and districts to improve the scheduling, mentoring, and evaluation structures needed to support formal teacher collaboration—and bolster the already rapid spread of team-teaching models, such as Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce Initiative and the nonprofit Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture.
“For professional learning, it is incredibly important for teachers to be in environments where they feel like they’re supported, they’re heard, and they can effectively teach and work together on that,” said Samantha Holquist, the director of research engagement at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
From isolated to collaborative training
More than two-thirds of public K-12 teachers believe collaborating with other educators is the “most useful” element of professional development, according to the GAO’s analysis of nationally representative RAND Corp. data, and collaboration was more likely to be linked to improved student test scores than PD models that emphasized curricular alignment or coaching.
One K-12 teacher separately interviewed by the GAO said collaborative learning with colleagues and classroom-embedded coaching have been the most useful kinds of professional development because the formats “allowed me to immediately apply what I learned, receive feedback, and adapt practices to fit my students’ needs.”
The federal guidance letter encourages districts to use their funding to pay stipends for lead or guest teachers, create collaborative planning blocks and schedules, or develop team-based training and evaluation strategies.
Such strategies allow teachers to learn in the context of their own students, rather than in more general school- or grade-wide training, said Richard “Lennon” Audrain, the head of innovation and policy initiatives for ASU’s Next Education Workforce project.
“Teachers are thinking about the kids they all share and what they need,” Audrain said, “as opposed to, ‘Oh, I went to this English conference and here’s some strategies I learned,’ absent of the context of the actual learners in your room.”
GAO finds disparate teacher training
For their analysis, GAO researchers analyzed five existing meta-analyses on teacher PD, administered teacher surveys, and conducted focused interviews with state officials and teachers in nine districts in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.
In the 2023–24 school year, GAO found school districts nationwide spent about $1.8 billion under Title II-A of the Every Student Succeeds Act,ranging from $32,000 in small districts to roughly $1.3 million in large districts. States spent roughly $101 million in Title II‑A funds that year, ranging from a high of $12 million in California to $262,000 in West Virginia. (The grants are weighted based on student population counts and poverty rates.)
The federal grants require teacher professional development to be sustained (as opposed to stand-alone, short-term workshops), intensive, collaborative, job-embedded, data-driven, and classroom-focused. But the GAO found districts are still more likely to report using one-shot training workshops than the intensive and sustained teacher professional development called for under Title II.
And Jacqueline Nowicki, the director of education, workforce, and income security issues for the GAO, said there’s still little consensus in the research about what parts of professional development beyond collaboration can significantly improve student test scores.
With all that’s happening in a classroom, “it’s just incredibly difficult to tease apart which of these things is driving the effect or even contributing to the effect” on student achievement, Nowicki said. “It’s not surprising, but ... it’s frustrating that after all this time there still isn’t any direct research that cracks that nut.”
