Best Practices in Professional Development

Video Transcription

In this tutorial, we'll discuss best practices in professional development. There are so many different elements that all work together to contribute to effective professional development experiences for teachers. Ultimately, we want this effective professional development to lead to increases in student achievement.

So in this tutorial, we'll discuss some characteristics of well-designed professional development, including teacher voice, collaboration, alignment, competency-based approach, teacher choice, differentiation, and sustainability. Let's get started.

Teacher voice is an important element of well-designed professional development. Teachers should be involved in all stages of PD, from planning to implementation to evaluation of the professional development activities or opportunities. Being involved in making decisions about both the focus and the design of professional development helps teachers to connect that professional development back to their classroom realities.

The result is stronger and more relevant professional learning opportunities, which lead to increases in student learning and student achievement. Furthermore, increasing teacher voice leads to increased teacher self-efficacy and empowerment.

Collaboration is another important characteristic of strong professional development. Collaborative work in aligning professional development goals to both school goals and district goals helps to increase teachers' commitment and sense of responsibility to not only their students, but also the school and the district, as well.

These collaborative opportunities should include critical dialogue with colleagues and critical reflection and both providing and receiving feedback. The desired end result of this process is to have teachers feel willing and able to revise their instructional approaches if that's necessary. And finally, professional development should both encourage and value peer-to-peer learning.

Next, let's discuss alignment. Effective professional development needs to be aligned to the vision and mission and goals and initiatives of the school and the district. Professional development can help to build capacity and to improve sustainability of district and school initiatives through alignment to these initiatives and to the overarching district strategic plans.

Professional development should also be aligned to adult learning theories and to professional teacher standards. This helps to ensure that teachers are going to benefit from professional development that uses a research-based delivery model that is proven to be effective with adult learners. It's especially important that the design of our professional development is informed by adult learning theories, including an emphasis on Knowles' six assumptions of adult learners.

It's also a best practice to consider aligning your professional development to social learning theory, situated learning theory, and networked learning theory. You may also consider aligning your professional development to professional teacher and leadership standards, which can help to measure the effectiveness of professional development and to measure teacher acquisition of the desired skills and competencies.

Finally, you might consider alignment to Marzano's high-yield instructional strategies or to Hattie's Visible Learning strategies. This also can help ensure that our professional development activities and the overall professional development plans that we're creating are going to focus on the strategies and skills that will have the greatest impact on our students' learning and ultimately their achievement.

Another characteristic of well-designed professional development is a competency-based approach. If our professional development is aligned to professional teaching standards, this helps us to identify the competencies that we want teachers to develop. And this, in turn, enables us to measure the impact of that professional development on the school, as well as on the teacher's development of those competencies.

The outcomes and objectives of the professional development plan need to be written as measurable competencies in terms of those professional teacher standards. And this is important because we want to be sure to use the same standards that the teacher is going to be evaluated with. This is going to ensure that each teacher's professional growth is going to not only meet, but exceed expectations of the professional learning community.

Another critical element in well-designed professional development is teacher choice. Unfortunately, we know that many professional development activities are simply seen as a waste of time by teachers. But there's one powerful way that we can significantly increase teachers' satisfaction with their professional development.

According to a Gates Foundation report, teachers who are allowed to choose the majority, or even all, of their professional learning experiences are more than twice as satisfied with that professional development as their colleagues who are not given such choices. Even more specifically, teachers value professional development that directly supports their work. For example, planning and reflecting on instruction.

So if we can embrace the power of personal choice in professional development and the potential it has to build teacher empowerment, this can ultimately help us to create professional development that increases student achievement. Really, one of the main reasons to choose to pursue professional development is to feel more empowered in terms of your own learning.

We want teachers to experience this empowerment process in which they become more capable of engaging in and sharing control of and influencing the variety of events and institutions that impact their daily lives. And so if teachers can be given the opportunity and the accompanying confidence to believe that they can act upon their ideas and to believe that they have influence over the way that they perform, again, the end result is increases in student achievement.

Well-designed professional development also incorporates differentiation. Professional development differentiation really parallels classroom differentiation. A key difference is that differentiated professional development starts by identifying teachers' strengths, and then uses those as the basis for the differentiation. A major benefit of differentiation in the context of PD is that it helps to build teachers' leadership capacity.

Research also tells us that administrators should be modeling the effective use of differentiation in PD if they want their teachers to also be able to use differentiation strategies effectively to meet the needs of all learners. Furthermore, if differentiation is one of the elements included in this process of involving teachers in all of the stages of professional development from selecting to planning to implementing the PD, this can, once again, lead to improvements in teacher growth and empowerment.

One final characteristic of effective professional development is sustainability. Professional development which is sustained over long periods of time is more effective than the more traditional, one-time workshop-style professional development. Ongoing professional development might include elements like peer coaching or peer-to-peer sharing and learning or review of data that is gathered over long periods of time.

When these best practices are considered in the creation of our professional development activities and professional development plans, we build teacher capacity and teach self-efficacy. We build the power of teachers to implement and sustain school in district-wide initiatives and to implement instructional strategies that are going to have the highest possible impact on student learning. Not only that, but another expected outcome of adhering to these best practices is increasing teacher engagement, which is absolutely necessary if we want to sustain long-term changes in practice.

So here's a great chance for you to stop and reflect. Consider whether your professional development plan contains these essential components.

For more information on how to apply what you learned in this video, please view the additional resources section that accompanies this video presentation. The additional resources section includes hyperlinks useful for applications of the course material, including a brief description of each resource. Thanks for joining me. Have a great day.