Professional Development

Education Week Teacher: It’s Not How Long You Spend in PD, It’s How Much You Grow

The research is clear: The “sit ‘n’ get” model of professional development doesn’t work.

Yet the majority of states continue to base the requirements for maintaining a teaching license on clock hours or seat time. And very often that looks like teachers heading en masse to one-off conferences and seminars, disconnected from their everyday classroom work.

Click the link above to view the entire article.

Ensuring that Good Professional Development Gets Results, National Institute for Excellence in Teaching

Two recent studies have finally demonstrated that “job-embedded, sustained professional development” can significantly improve student achievement. But there’s a catch. In both studies, effective professional development (PD) strategies were successful only under certain circumstances or only in some schools and classrooms. The determining factor was not the quality of the PD itself, but rather the conditions under which it was delivered. It turns out that job-embedded PD can be highly effective, but only when there is a sufficient infrastructure in place to support it…

Learning Policy Institute: Effective Teacher Professional Development