We’re planning a professional development programme. What must our programme achieve? Should we educate, inform or entertain? Should we share ideas, teach skills, motivate teachers, or build habits? Should we – could we – do all of the above?
Or, conversely, we know that a lot of professional development doesn’t work. How can we avoid this?
In a systematic review of teacher professional development for the Education Endowment Foundation, we tried to answer this question by suggesting four purposes of professional development and testing the impact of addressing them. We found promising evidence that this simple model can lead to effective professional development.
The four purposes of professional development
We suggested that professional development can address four purposes:
- Instilling insight: helping teachers grasp learning principles – for example, that working memory is limited
- Motivating goal-directed behaviour: encouraging teachers to want to teach differently – for example, to reduce the burden on students’ working memories
- Teaching techniques: helping teachers master new skills – for example, introducing new ideas in stages
- Embedding practice: supporting teachers to make and sustain changes until they become habits
Omitting one or more of these purposes seems likely to undermine professional development. For example, if I’m training teachers and I:
- Instil insights and motivate goal-setting but don’t teach techniques, teachers will want to change, but won’t know how to;
- Instil insights, motivate goal-setting and teach techniques but don’t help teachers embed practices, they may try to change, but will soon fall back into old habits;
- Motivate goal-setting, teach techniques and embed practice but don’t instil insight, teachers may misapply the technique – we will see lethal mutations.
| (Instil) Insight | (Motivate) Goals | (Develop) Techniques | (Embed) Practice | Result: |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Revert to old habits | |
| ✓ | ✓ | Knowing/doing gap | ||
| ✓ | No implementation | |||
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Misapplication | |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | More likely to work |
So our theory was that a successful programme would address all four purposes. We called this a balanced design.
A balanced design is no guarantee of success. What we ask teachers to change and how well we implement our programme matters too. But it seemed more likely to increase student learning.
Testing a balanced design of professional development
Our systematic review found 100+ randomised controlled trials testing teacher professional development programmes. We also identified a range of mechanisms programmes could use to help teachers change.
We organised these mechanisms within the purposes they addressed. For example, to teach teachers a technique (purpose), you could use instruction, modelling, rehearsal and feedback (mechanisms). (You can find out more about the mechanisms here, and about how we divided the mechanisms between the four purposes on page 39 of the report.)
We then tested whether the impact each teacher development programme had on student learning reflected how many purposes it addressed. That is, we checked whether programmes which (for example) only helped teachers gain new insight were more or less likely to increase student learning than programmes which also taught techniques, motivated goal-directed behaviour and embedded practice.
The results
A programme which addresses all four purposes increases student learning three times more than a programme which addresses one, two or three purposes.*
The chart below shows how substantial this difference is. Address one, two or three purposes, and the impact of a programme hovers around 0.05 standard deviations. Address all four, and the impact jumps to around 0.15 standard deviations.**
The average impact of a balanced professional development programme on student learning is therefore much bigger than the impact of the average randomised controlled trial in education (0.06 standard deviations; Lortie-Forgues and Inglis, 2019)
It’s also much bigger than the impact of ten years’ experience on a teacher’s effectiveness (0.11 standard deviations; Kraft and Papay, 2016).
What should leaders of professional development do with this knowledge
For the review, we looked at whether purposes were addressed within a programme. That is, if, in a year-long programme, you ever used a mechanism which helps instil insight, you got a tick for insight. We couldn’t dig much deeper than this (to look at when, or how often, this took place): very few studies described programme design in enough detail to allow this. So what follows is more speculative. That said, these are the three implications I take from the results:
1) Address all four purposes with as many mechanisms as you can
The other main finding of our research was that the more mechanisms you use, the more effective your professional development is likely to be. So we want to do two things in planning teacher development:
- Address all four purposes
- Include as many mechanisms addressing these purposes as we (reasonably) can
Don’t teach techniques through modelling alone: model, then have teachers rehearse the techniques, then offer feedback.
2) Address all four purposes, whatever the size of your ‘programme’
We could look at the purposes as ways to overcome barriers to change. To change, teachers must:
- Understand why the change works (insight)
- Want to change (goal)
- Know how to change (technique)
- Be supported to make a lasting change (practice)
In a year-long programme, I want to address all four purposes.
In a half-hour session, I also want to address all four purposes.
In a two-minute conversation with a teacher, I still want to address all four purposes. Consider the following (prototypical and overly directive) example of such a conversation:
“That was great, I loved how you kept using probing questions to find out exactly what students had missed in the model. I do just want to ask you to think back to what we talked about last term: ensuring students are meaningfully processing ideas at every opportunity. The main independent task in the lesson seemed to lack this. Students were taking information from one sheet and turning it into notes (Instil insight). I’ve seen you getting students processing meaningfully a lot more frequently recently – I’d love to see a bit more of it with this class (Motivate Goal-setting). If you have a look at this worksheet, you can see how this might work differently. Students are being asked to select the most important factors explaining this phenomenon and justify their selection (Teach Techniques). What are you doing with this class next lesson? Could you use the structure of this worksheet to encourage more meaningful processing? Great, let me know how it goes (Embed practice)?”
As I say, this is stylised and prototypical: it’s meant to illustrate what I might try to do – not exactly how the conversation would go. My point is that even in a two-minute discussion, we can address all four purposes. So we should.
3) Address all four purposes as many times as you can within a programme
It often takes multiple attempts to change: to grasp a new idea, to master a technique, to make something a habit. We try something once, twice, and then ideas and experiences somehow click into place. In our study, a programme got a ‘tick’ for having a balanced design if it described tackling each purpose once (because the detail available from most papers was pretty limited). In reality, the more times we tick the insight box, the more likely we are to have the desired impact.
So don’t plan to cover insight then move on: introduce it early, and come back to it. Don’t plan to spend ages on insight, and move to techniques and practice later. Start practising as soon as possible – then return to the underlying insight with that fresh experience. Address each purpose as many times as you reasonably can.
Conclusion
Professional development can do four things:
- Instil insight: show teachers the big ideas underlying change, and why they matter
- Motivate goal-setting: encourage teachers to want to change
- Teach techniques: show teachers what to change, and how
- Embed practice: help teachers make lasting change
If we miss any of these things out, lasting change and increased student learning are far less likely. Teachers who want to change but don’t know what to do differently struggle. Teachers who make changes but don’t understand why the change works struggle too.
So as we plan professional development, we can ask ourselves:
- How am I helping teachers to understand how and why this change works?
- How am I helping teachers to want to change?
- How am I teaching teachers how to change?
- How am I helping teachers to sustain change?
The stronger our answers to all four of these questions, the more likely we are to see teaching improve.
Notes
* A statistician wouldn’t say “the impact is three times bigger.” First, because it’s not exactly three times. Second, because the impact estimate for programmes which address all four purposes has wide confidence intervals. To dig into this, start on page 38 of the full report. The evidence is not irrefutable, but it’s our best bet currently.
** The non-linearity of the effect of addressing all four purposes – the size of the jump between addressing three and four purposes – gives us particular confidence in this effect. We know that having more mechanisms makes a difference. But we don’t see an increase in the effects when we move from addressing one purpose to two, or from two to three. Unbalanced designs all have effects around the 0.05 mark; balanced designs have a substantially greater effect.
If you enjoyed this, you may appreciate
A post on the three questions we need to answer for professional development to work here: what to learn, how to learn it, and how to make it work in reality.
A discussion of the systematic review’s findings about mechanisms of change, here.
A discussion of the how hard it is to effectively implement professional development here.
This post describes findings from our systematic review of professional development (with Sam Sims, Alison O’Mara-Eves, Sarah Cottingham and other colleagues). This EEF guidance report is based on it.