There is a wide gap between how teachers and school leaders view professional development. For many teachers, PD conjures up images of boring, one-sided lectures that have little to do with their classroom reality.
In fact, almost half of the 1,498 teachers surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center in October 2023 said they found their PD “irrelevant.” In stark contrast, only 16 percent of the 659 school leaders surveyed during the same period thought the same about teacher PD.
School leaders have tried different things to make the PD they offer more relevant and engaging for teachers. Some have encouraged teachers to pick a topic they’re passionate about, while others have moved mandatory PD modules online for teachers to complete at their convenience. Some school leaders believe frequent follow-up check-ins with teachers can help them apply what they learn in their PD sessions.
Still, it’s a struggle for school leaders to design the PD teachers want as they juggle district-mandated trainings and initiatives needed to meet their schools’ goals, said Brooklyn Joseph, a lead program facilitator with Lead by Learning, a program at Northeastern University where she partners with schools to design professional learning.
With all this information coming at them, teachers feel like they’re ingesting a lot of content that doesn’t always link back to their classroom practice, Joseph said during an Education Week K-12 Essentials Forum on school leadership last month.
Getting PD right isn’t just a time or resource challenge, Renee Gugel, an assistant professor of teacher leadership at the National Louis University in Chicago, said during the forum. To make PD fun and engaging for teachers, principals also need to build their own capacity.
“Sometimes, [the obstacle] is not knowing how to go about it,” Gugel added.
Gugel and Joseph made three key recommendations to school leaders on designing PD that’s useful to teachers. Their session can be viewed in the above video.
Start with the right information
Surveys at the start of the school year are a good way to pick up information on the kind of PD teachers want. The challenge is that school leaders seldom share or reflect on the results with teachers, Gugel said.
“It can be hard [for school leaders] to share the results. Teachers are going to say stuff you don’t agree with or feel offended by, because you planned the PD [sessions],” Gugel said.
But if school leaders can be transparent about the feedback in staff meetings, it can signal to teachers that they’ve been heard and their concerns are being addressed. “It’s an immediate climate shifter,” Gugel said.
The information loop shouldn’t be restricted to surveys. Joseph recommends creating “design teams” of veteran and new teachers across grades and subject areas who can help school leaders plan PD based on past survey feedback. Teachers may respond to PD better if their peers help plan it, Joseph said, and design teams can help make these sessions more relevant to their needs.
“School leaders don’t have to plan all the PD by themselves in a vacuum,” Joseph said.
Teachers should also have the option to answer survey questions anonymously, Gugel said, if they are nervous about openly critiquing a PD session planned by their principal.
Strike a balance between teacher agency and a school’s instructional goals
Effective PD should focus on one or two key topics chosen by teachers, Joseph said.
“Just like we provide structures and routines for students in classrooms to do their own independent learning, once we allow that choice [to teachers], we find that they want to explore [more] about their instructional practices. [Teachers] have to care about what they’re learning,” Joseph said.
Gugel added that PD should be actionable—teachers should be able to apply practices they learn during PD in their classrooms shortly after the session takes place.
The PD that emerges from this process, though, should not be completely detached from the school’s instructional goals.
The process to find the best PD should be grounded in a school’s data, Joseph said. School leaders and teachers can look at test scores as well as internal school indicators like student behavior. Teachers and school leaders should look at these data together and determine areas for improvement.
By doing that, Joseph said, teachers have the agency to choose their own PD but are still guided by the school’s overall instructional goals.
Some school leaders can be wary of giving too much choice to teachers. Gugel warned against this: “When teachers hear that their school leaders trust them to use their [PD] time well, that’s motivating in itself.”
The most popular form of teacher PD
The most exciting form of PD, both experts agreed, is when teachers can learn from each other.
Teachers learn from each other informally through observing classrooms or catching up over instructional strategies in their free time. But Gugel and Joseph recommended that school leaders also create more formal PD spaces for such sharing.
Then, teachers can share their experiences trying out new teaching methods and discuss new patterns of student learning. For instance, teachers can use these spaces to drill down on specific tactics like how to best organize a classroom to encourage student learning in smaller groups.
These “collaborative groupings"—as part of smaller professional learning communities or larger PD sessions—can also help newer teachers get a feel for what’s going on in their peers’ classrooms, and how they can adapt some of these instructional strategies in their own teaching, Joseph said. This type of PD is a useful way, too, for veteran teachers to share their experiences, instead of spending time going over trainings they’ve already had.
Arranging this opportunity for PD might be yet another task on a leader’s to-do list, but Joseph said it’s worth the effort.
“We want to have a vision for where we are taking teachers,” she said. “But we also want to provide space and time for teachers to take us on a different journey … [to] the place where they are feeling inspired and passionate.”
