TL/DR
I’ve now written almost fifty posts about teacher professional development across ten years. I’d suggest starting with these ones:
- If we want professional development to work, we need to answer three questions: what are teachers learning? How are they learning it? And how are we going to make this work?
- It doesn’t matter what form of professional development we choose – what matters are the mechanisms we use and the purposes we address.
- All teacher development should be practice-based.
- Most observations don’t help teachers get better – instructional coaching can make a big difference.
- Implementation is tough: reality will upset all your plans – an iterative approach can help.
What is teacher education and why is it hard?
What are we aiming for? I’ve described what makes expert teachers and what intermediate learning is (between being a novice and an expert), and summarised the evidence on teacher expertise on video.
Why is it hard? I’ve looked at why teacher training doesn’t stick and why good professional development still fails and discussed my concerns on video at ResearchED Scand.
So, what should teacher educators do?
I co-designed The Learning Curriculum: a guide for teacher educators to use in teaching teachers the science of learning, including principles, examples, activities and assessments.
I’ve argued that teacher learning is just learning – and we should treat it as such. I’ve suggested eight priorities for teacher educators, ideas for heads of department and described the approach I took within school as head of Continuing Professional Development. I revisited what heads of department can do in more detail after I spent more time working with them!
(Re)building an evidence base for effective professional development
I spent about five years working with Sam Sims to test, critique and improve the evidence base for teacher professional development. First, we examined the existing consensus view (that professional development should be collaborative, sustained, subject-specific, and so on) and showed that the evidence these claims rested on was very limited. Then we led a systematic review of the evidence available, seeking the forms and mechanisms and the specific techniques which made a difference. I summed up our findings in a series of posts. This post introduces three key questions we need to consider. We found that mechanisms of behaviour change made a substantial difference to the effectiveness of professional development. Conversely, we found that the form of professional development you chose didn’t matter: it’s the mechanisms, not the form, that makes a difference. I’ve also looked at the difficulties of implementation and the challenge reality poses to effective professional development.
Practice
I believe deliberate practice is crucial to teacher education, and I’ve spent five years refining my approach. I began by looking at how we put practice perfect into practice. That convinced me that all teacher education should be practice-based and that deliberate practice can develop teachers’ skills and improve their decision making. So how do we make that happen? I’ve written about:
- How to plan practice-based training
- How to ensure verbal feedback works in training
- How to create a culture of practice, and, going beyond that, how to make practice irresistible
- How to assess the impact of practice-based training on teaching
I’ve drawn a lot of this together into a framework for designing and facilitating practice-based training. (I’ve also discussed the evidence on deliberate practice and its limitations for teacher education). I’ve also looked at how changing teacher habits is important.
Instructional coaching
If practice-based training is crucial to training groups, its analogue is instructional coaching: It makes sense to begin by examining why most observations don’t help teachers improve. A better option is instructional coaching, and this series of posts explains its introduction in one school:
- How does instructional coaching work?
- What effect does instructional coaching have?
- What effect does instructional coaching have on staff culture?
- How to develop instructional coaching further
Broader ideas
What else can we do to promote teacher education? I’ve discussed how we can improve pedagogical content knowledge and considered how we can promote lightbulb moments for teachers. We might also consider how we can use habit, the merits of checklists and the benefits of mental simulation. I worked on a research project which showed providing models can make a big difference to teacher improvement. I’ve also suggested that there’s merit in teacher choice in professional development and trying to put the continuing into CPD. Finally, I’ve asked whether it takes the best teachers to be the best teacher educators.
Other countries, other fields
I’ve described some of the teacher education I’ve seen in other countries and fields, including:
- Singapore
- Sweden
- United States: Teach Like a Champion training and Uncommon schools professional development
- Simulation in continuing medical education
- Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation
The book
Not yet! But this will be my next project – probably out late next year. If you’re interested in keeping in touch with the project, and/or would like to read a draft section, please let me know, using the form below.