Time and support to do your job better – what’s not to like? Something, apparently. Only 45% of teachers believe their school’s professional development provision is helping them improve. Schools could buy in external programmes instead – but of the many programmes evaluated by the EEF, few have had positive effects. Why is it so hard to get professional development right – and what can we do?
Effective professional development does three things well:
- Identifies teaching skills which will improve student learning
- Helps teachers learn those skills
- Fits this around life in busy schools
Leading professional development is so hard because this is a test on which only full marks suffice. Beautifully-designed and implemented training – about learning styles – is as disappointing as meticulously-evidenced cognitive science – explained maladroitly.
This post frames the three things needed for professional development to work as three questions. It’s partly based on a recent systematic review of the evidence conducted with Sam Sims, Sarah Cottingham and Alison O’Mara Eves, which I’ll write more about in future posts.
Question 1: What do we want teachers to know and do?
To be effective, professional development must help teachers do things that help students learn more. Why make such an obvious statement? Well, in the last few years, the EEF has funded evaluations of programmes which encouraged teachers to:*
- Talk less to students during classwork, so students can work things out themselves (Hanley et al., 2016; Humphrey et al., 2018; IEE, 2016);
- Teach students French to improve their English; teach students computing to improve their maths (Boylan et al., 2018; Wiggins et al., 2017);
- Work together – without clear guidance on what to work on (CEP, 2014; Humphrey et al., 2020).
None of these programmes significantly increased learning (four of them had negative, but non-significant, results). Perhaps this is because:
- Learning in French didn’t transfer to English; learning in computing didn’t transfer to maths;
- When a programme lacked a clear focus, teachers didn’t get much from it;
- When teachers didn’t help students… you can guess what happened.
Effective professional development must promote valid, viable strategies to improve learning. I’ve suggested some strategies (in Responsive Teaching and Habits of Success). Almost everyone with internet access has done the same, and any robust source of guidance will work, such as Rosenshine, Deans for Impact or the Great Teaching Toolkit. What matters is that we identify teaching strategies which will make a difference for our students.
Question 2: How will we help teachers change?
Midnight. An angel soothes your worried brow, and whispers a teaching strategy so perfect it guarantees stellar results for your students. Question 1 is solved.
Morning. Your brow furrows again. Knowing what’s needed isn’t enough. How are you to show the strategy matters, and help teachers change?
Historically, researchers have answered this question by pointing to features of professional development associated with impact. For example, programmes which work tend to be collaborative, sustained and subject-specific (for example, Cordingley et al., 2015). Unfortunately, these correlations don’t necessarily explain why they work. An effective programme may include collaboration. That doesn’t mean collaboration caused improvement. A sustained programme may or may not help: it depends whether we’re sustaining formative assessment or LiteraPE. In other words (Sam Sims and I argue) superficial features like collaboration are poor (and poorly-evidenced) proxies for effectiveness. Our systematic review took a fresh look at the evidence, focusing on two things.
1) Addressing four purposes
Professional development can do four things:
- Promote teacher insight – I know that working memory is limited
- Motivate goal-directed behaviour – I’ll limit the burden on my students’ working memories
- Teach techniques – I’ll use dual coding to overcome that burden
- Embed practice – I’ll make it a habit
Programmes which addressed all four were more likely to lead to increased student learning (than those that addressed three or fewer). This makes sense: a teacher can’t use an insight (working memory is limited) without a practical technique way to apply it (like dual coding). A teacher won’t use a practical technique for long without help making it a habit. And encouraging teachers to use a technique habitually – without discussing why it works – is as reliable a source of lethal mutations as a bat collecting expedition down a Chinese mine.
2) Using mechanisms of change:
Professional development must help teachers to change their practice. We made a shortlist of mechanisms which help people to change, resisting the temptation just to include only our favourites, and instead including only those for which we found a promising body of evidence. These included setting goals, planning when and where to act, and rehearsing. The more behaviour change mechanisms a programme include, the more likely it was to help students learn more.
Both of these findings were new – at least to the research literature. (I’ll say more about them in future posts.) They offer a powerful recipe to help teachers adopt a change: use a range of mechanisms to address all four purposes.
Question 3: How will we make our plans fit reality?
You can have the best teaching strategy and the best training design – and still see your plans awry. As Mike Tyson almost put it, “Everyone has a plan, until they get put on cover.” Our good ideas must still work as colleagues get sick, photocopiers fail, and prioritise shift.
This demands meticulous execution: getting the details right, searching out barriers, overcoming them. My favourite non-example is the programme which had problems getting teachers to attend training – having scheduled it during SATs week. It also means adapting programmes so they work for teachers – while sticking to the underlying principles.
Looking at implementation in our systematic review, we found a number of things that help. Some are obvious, like getting support from leaders. Others are also obvious, like making things as quick, easy and efficient as possible for teachers. Others are obvious too, like offering changes which meet teachers’ needs. Obvious things get forgotten: we have to make professional development work for teachers.
Conclusion
So why does much professional development go wrong? Getting all three things right is hard. You spend months reading the evidence – then struggle to make it usable for colleagues in different departments. You spend hours honing your use of deliberate practice – but find briefing keeps encroaching on professional development. A lot of promising work goes to naught.
All the more reason to think hard about all three questions simultaneously:
- What do we want teachers to know and do?
- How will we help teachers change?
- How will we make our plans fit reality?
Future posts will say more about how we can do this.
If you found this interesting, you may like:
- Our systematic review of professional development, and the EEF guidance report based on it.
- Our paper criticising claims that correlational features explain effective professional development (summary, journal article ($), open-access version)
- This post, on why good professional development still fails
- How I approached this in school as a professional development (dated, but still useful)
- My next book, on effective teacher development
* Evaluating programmes which don’t return positive results isn’t necessarily a criticism of the EEF. Evaluations which turn out null or negative results allow them to write things like this, encouraging schools not to spend time and money on popular programmes which don’t work.