Good Professional Development Mirrors Good Teaching

Mike Anderson wrote this in 2015 to show that teacher professional development should use the same methods it asks teachers to use. A new section below checks Anderson’s four points against research from 2017 to 2024 and offers planning steps for school leaders.

“I went to a workshop on active learning, and we just sat and listened all day!”

“I attended a ‘differentiated instruction’ seminar, and we all did the same thing at the same time!”

“Why can’t we ever get professional development days that actually use good instructional practices?”

T hese kinds of comments, all too commonly voiced by teachers, underscore one of the greatest frustrations teachers have with professional development. Often, professional development that claims to be all about great teaching and learning doesn’t employ the very strategies it claims to promote. This can have some significant negative impacts. Teachers may question the value of the strategies being taught, feel devalued themselves, and quickly shut down. It doesn’t take long in a PD setting like this before teachers display all of the typical characteristics of disengaged learners: texting, playing games on their phones, having side conversations, and even being actively disruptive.

So, perhaps you’re a teacher leader or administrator who will be leading professional development for colleagues. Or, perhaps you are looking to hire a consultant to lead adult learning in your school or district. What are some key elements of effective professional development? Not surprisingly, they are the same kinds of qualities we hope to see employed in classrooms with students. If you are leading professional development yourself, consider how these elements might strengthen your work. If you are bringing in an outside consultant, you might ask questions about these elements.

Active and Interactive Learning

Professional development should involve lots of active participation. Teachers should spend at least as much time interacting with each other, or actively engaged in work, as they spend listening to a presenter. They might read an article or watch a short video and discuss in a small group, brainstorm ideas and then get up and share ideas with others, or even simply have a partner chat with a colleague after a short presentation. It should be remembered that whoever is doing the talking and the moving is doing the learning. Make sure the facilitator isn’t the one doing all of the learning.

Practice What Is Preached

Is the experience about differentiation? Then make sure to offer differentiated options for teachers. Is the workshop about choice? Make sure to give choices about learning as a part of the experience. Is the experience about hands-on science? Make sure to get supplies and materials into the hands of teachers so they can try them out. And, just like when using these practices with students, the purpose must be clear. Practices will feel gimmicky and shallow if used in ways that don’t actually help facilitate learning.

Effective Management

Perhaps one of the reasons that sit-and-git professional development is still the norm is that active and interactive learning is more challenging to facilitate. It requires structures and management practices to help the group work effectively. How will people ask questions? How will the group come back together after an active experience? What materials are needed, and what’s an efficient way of distributing those when they’re needed? Taking care of logistics and setting adults up for success with details helps them focus on the learning at hand while also demonstrating effective management of interactive learning they can use with their students.

A Safe and Supportive Environment

Perhaps most importantly, great learning happens within the context of emotional safety. Adults (just like students) who feel threatened, patronized, dismissed, or left out will shut down. Especially when the professional development is about a controversial issue or suggests a change in practice that may elicit defensiveness, particular care and caution should be taken by the facilitator. A tone of empathy and support will help adult learners stay emotionally open so that new learning is possible.

Clearly, this is not an exhaustive list, and there are many other qualities we might look for in effective professional development. Perhaps there’s one final question we might ask to help us get going in the right direction: “What would an ideal classroom look like—one where students are engaged and learning?” When we can provide teachers with professional development that mirrors the best kinds of learning experiences we hope to provide for our students, then we know that it is time well spent.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of Mike Anderson.

Differentiated professional development for teachers: what the research says about training that practices what it teaches

Differentiated professional development for teachers means training in which adults receive the same kind of choices, pacing and support that a differentiated classroom gives students. Mike Anderson’s 2015 article above makes the case from the teacher’s side of the table: a workshop on active learning that consists of sitting and listening, or a seminar on differentiation in which everyone does the same thing at the same time, teaches the opposite of its subject. This section looks at what research published since then says about Anderson’s four points, and where the evidence is thinner than it first appears.

What a large research review found

In 2017 the Learning Policy Institute published a review by Linda Darling-Hammond, Maria Hyler and Madelyn Gardner of 35 studies that linked teacher professional development to changes in teaching and in student results. The review describes the 35 studies as methodologically rigorous and drew them from those that showed a positive link, so the seven features describe programs that worked and not every program that was tried. The authors identified seven features that effective programs tended to share: a focus on content, active learning, collaboration, models of effective practice, coaching and expert support, feedback and reflection, and enough time to learn, practice and reflect.

Several of Anderson’s points map onto that list. Anderson’s call for active and interactive learning matches the review’s description of teachers designing and trying out strategies themselves, so that they experience the kind of learning they will later offer students. Anderson’s advice to practice what is preached corresponds to the review’s models of effective practice, where teachers see what good teaching looks like through lesson plans, samples of student work, peer observation or video. Anderson’s point about management, meaning clear routines for asking questions, regrouping and handing out materials, does not appear as a separate feature in the review, but it is the practical work that makes active learning possible in a room full of adults. Anderson’s fourth point, emotional safety, does not appear among the seven features. Anderson’s reasoning that adults who feel patronized or left out stop participating rests on experience in schools rather than on that review, and it is a sound reason for a facilitator to attend to tone, particularly when a session asks teachers to change a long-standing habit.

What the research cannot yet say

Researchers have questioned how firmly lists like this one can be stated. Christa Asterhan and Adam Lefstein, writing in Professional Development in Education in 2024, examined the reviews behind the commonly cited five to seven features, using the evidence standards the field applies to itself. They concluded that the foundations are weaker than they look, that claims of methodological rigor rest on flawed inferences, and that searching for general features that work everywhere is itself a questionable goal. They called for more work on theories of how teachers learn.

For a school leader, this does not mean setting the features aside, since they agree with what many teachers say they want from a training day. It means treating them as reasonable design principles to try in one building, and then checking whether teaching actually changed afterward. A single session that follows every principle can still leave classrooms untouched if nobody returns to the ideas, which is one reason duration and follow-up appear in the Learning Policy Institute review.

Making professional development differentiated in practice

The following decisions follow from Anderson’s article and the research above. They are suggestions for a planning team, not findings from a particular study.

• Offer a choice of strand when staff differ in experience, so that newer teachers and veteran teachers are not asked to work through the same task at the same pace.
• Tie the content to subjects and grade levels that teachers actually teach, because the review found content focus among the shared features.
• Plan the agenda against talk time. Anderson suggests teachers should spend at least as much time interacting or working as listening to a presenter, and a leader can check a draft schedule against that.
• Write down the logistics: how questions will be asked, how the group will come back together, and who distributes materials.
• Schedule a follow-up, such as a coaching visit or a short peer observation, before the training day takes place.
• When hiring an outside consultant, ask how the session will model the practice it teaches, and what teachers will be doing, rather than hearing, during the first hour.

Anderson ends the article with a question worth keeping on the planning table: what would an ideal classroom look like, with students engaged and learning? Training that gives teachers a version of that experience also gives them a working example to adapt. For the wider picture of how schools plan staff learning, see edCircuit’s professional development guide, and for a related piece on teachers as learners, read EdTruth Files: When Teachers Are Students.

Related reading

• EdTruth Files: When Teachers Are Students

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