What don’t we know about effective professional development?

Let’s start with what we do know.

We know that most professional development programmes increase student learning. On average, the difference they make for students is equivalent to replacing a novice teacher with a teacher of a decade’s experience (Fletcher-Wood and Zuccollo, 2020).

We know how effective many professional development programmes are. For example, we know that Dialogic Teaching and Embedding Formative Assessment have had – on average – a positive effect on student learning, while Achievement for All has not. This is useful if you’re considering buying into one of these programmes. But it doesn’t help if your school can’t afford the programme, can’t access it, or wants to design its own approach to professional development, tailored to teachers’ needs.

We know the characteristics which are supposed to make professional development effective. It’s claimed that professional development succeeds when it’s sustained, collaborative and subject-specific, when teachers buy in and learn actively, and when external experts offer support. But we know that the evidence for these characteristics is weak: they appear in many effective programmes (although not all) – but that doesn’t mean they are causing those programmes’ success (more on this here).

So what we don’t know is how we should design professional development. We don’t know why effective programmes work. We don’t know what about them helps teachers improve. We have theories, but we don’t have robust evidence to say that combining X and Y will make professional development effective – and that adding Z won’t help.

How can we learn more?

Seeking effective forms and mechanisms

Identifying effective programmes is worthwhile. Identifying characteristics they have in common is less valuable. More usefully still, we can identify forms and mechanisms of effective professional development (Sims and Fletcher-Wood, 2019).

Forms

A form is a broad category. For example, there are many instructional coaching programmes, but we can consider instructional coaching a form because all these programmes have common features: observations and specific feedback. The My Teaching Partner programme is definitely an example of instructional coaching; Research Learning Communities definitely isn’t. Categorising professional development programmes into forms let’s us evaluate the effectiveness of those forms. For example, instructional coaching programmes improve student learning substantially, on average (Kraft, Blazar and Hogan, 2018).

Identifying effective forms is useful. Knowing that two or three forms of professional development tend to work (and two or three don’t), can guide our choices. Forms offer flexibility: instructional coaching can work with expert or peer coaches, and with different frequencies of observation, for example. So far however, instructional coaching is the only form for which we have robust evidence of effectiveness. And flexibility risks vagueness: knowing instructional coaching works in general does not tell us how often teachers should be observed, or how to structure feedback.

Mechanisms

A mechanism is an active ingredient: something which causes teachers to change their behaviour. Mechanisms are “observable, replicable and irreducible components of an intervention (Michie et al., 2013).” For example, collaboration is not a mechanism (it’s too vague: what is happening is neither clear nor replicable). But organising practical support (giving teachers time to support one another’s planning to use formative assessment, for example) is a mechanism.

Identifying effective mechanisms is vital. Focusing on mechanisms allows us to describe what we are doing in unambiguous terms, and so to learn from each other’s successes. Analysing the mechanisms used by programmes could reveal the combination(s) of mechanisms which help teachers to improve. As yet, however, we don’t know which mechanisms are effective.

Our research

We’re trying to fill these knowledge gaps, by identifying the forms and mechanisms of professional development which help teachers to improve. (‘We’ is a team from Ambition Institute, UCL Institute of Education, and CfE Research, conducting a review for the Education Endowment Foundation.)

We have four tasks:

  1. Identify the mechanisms to look for: review the evidence to select mechanisms that might make a difference.
  2. Identify and map all relevant existing studies of professional development.
  3. Examine which mechanisms these studies used; use these to identify the mechanisms and forms (combinations of mechanisms) associated with effectiveness.
  4. Look at the practicalities: if certain mechanisms are particularly effective, how much are schools using them already, and what are the practical barriers to using them more?

We hope to identify the mechanisms and forms which make a difference. By doing so, we hope to make it easier to describe and analyse what makes professional development work. For example, it’s obvious that feeling supported encourages teachers to change, but what kinds of support matter most? It’s obvious that you need to plan how to improve, but what kinds of planning make a difference? Clearly support, planning, trust, motivation, inspiration, observations, feedback, practice and new learning can all contribute. But which are essential, which are optional, and are any redundant?

We hope that this will provide fresh guidance for colleagues leading, designing and commissioning professional development. Our work will inform an EEF guidance report on professional development, to be published later this year. Much of our work applies common sense concepts which won’t surprise teacher educators. But these are common sense concepts which aren’t always discussed, reported or demanded. We’re looking at professional development more closely than ever before. We’re excited.

Conclusion

We’ve just begun this work: I can’t tell you which forms and mechanisms work. But I can ask you to consider:

  • What forms of professional development have you experienced?
  • What mechanisms do you use (what makes your programme supportive)?
  • What combination of influences is essential for teachers to improve?
  • How can you use our work?

My next post looks at what mechanisms are more closely.

If you liked this, you might also be interested in…

  • A critique of the evidence that there are characteristics of professional development.
  • A discussion of forms, programmes and mechanisms – what we know and what we’d like to find out here (page 78).

References

Fletcher-Wood, H. and Zuccollo, J., (2020). The effects of high-quality professional development on teachers and students: a rapid review and meta-analysis. Education Policy Institute.

Kraft, M., Blazar, D., Hogan, D. (2018). The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence. Review of Educational Research, 88(4), pp.547-588.

Michie, S., Richardson, M., Johnston, M., Abraham, C., Francis, J., Hardeman, W., Eccles, M. P., Cane, J. and Wood, C. E. (2013). The Behavior Change Technique Taxonomy (v1) of 93 Hierarchically Clustered Techniques: Building an International Consensus for the Reporting of Behavior Change Interventions. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 46(1), 81-95.

Sims, S., & Fletcher-Wood, H. (2019). Identifying evidence-based professional development: programmes, forms and mechanisms. In Scutt, C., & Harrison, S., (Eds.) Teacher CPD: International trends, opportunities and challenges. John Catt Educational. Page 78-83.