Professional Development: Has Anything Really Changed?
When a professional development project ends, what remains behind?
Disciplinary literacy PD and how to measure what lasted: Guskey's five levels, the newcomer method, and what a 2026 GAO review of research says.
Jacy Ippolito, Christina L. Dobbs and Megin Charner-Laird wrote this 2017 article on how a school can tell what remained after a disciplinary literacy professional learning project ended, using an example from Brookline, Massachusetts. The section below the original looks at how to evaluate professional development and what a 2026 federal review says about the research.
As researchers and university consultants who design and study literacy professional development projects, we are always curious about “what remains” when a particular project comes to an end. What new capacities may have been built as the result of professional learning: new capacities for teachers, for students, or for the school as an organization? What evidence suggests that a particular professional learning initiative for teachers made a difference in classroom practices? In teacher collaborative learning routines? Do we see broader cultural shifts? Or, do we just see “business as usual,” with very little evidence of impact from professional learning (gulp)?
While there is much science and art to measuring the effects of professional learning (see, for instance, the work of Thomas Guskey), many teachers and school leaders are interested in quick and easy ways to answer the question: “Did our professional learning project make a difference in our school?”
Studying Disciplinary Literacy Professional Learning
Recently, we have been studying professional learning initiatives focused on disciplinary literacy, supporting and observing middle and high school teachers as they apprentice their students into the ways of reading, writing, and communicating like authors, historians, mathematicians, and scientists. We believe this work is essential at this point in U.S. history. As argued by many over the past decade (Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, 2010; Moje, 2015; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008; Toth, 2017), a focus on high-level, discipline-specific reading, writing, and communication skills is key to helping students succeed in college and the workplace. Moreover, disciplinary literacy instruction may be key in helping students identify their own interests, passions, talents, and identities – to set goals and then pursue those goals with high-level skills.
Finally, it has been suggested that all of these high-level discipline-specific skills are necessary in helping to create an informed citizenry, with equal career access and opportunities for all students. However, achieving all of these goals is a lot to ask of a specific professional learning project.
When Professional Learning Projects Come to an End
Though some professional learning projects meet many of their goals, they inevitably come to an end – even authentic, long-lived professional learning initiatives such as those described in our recent book: Investigating Disciplinary Literacy: A Framework for Collaborative Professional Learning. In the book, we outline how successful secondary school teams often go through planning, implementation, and expansion/evaluation phases of professional learning work. We suggest a straight forward seven-step process to guide secondary school teachers and leaders through these three phases, with each step supported by research, our own experiences, and snapshots of practice from middle and high school teachers and leaders. Yet, even these robust projects come to a natural close.
As Joe McDonald and the Cities and Schools Research Group write in their excellent book American School Reform: What Works, What Fails, and Why, “action spaces,” or the intersection of money, civic capacity, and professional capacity, can allow for a great deal of professional learning and school reform to occur in a short period of time. And yet all action spaces are destined to “collapse” when available resources or civic goodwill come to an end. Whereas many educators view the end of professional learning initiatives through the lens of failure and what was not accomplished, McDonald disagrees, suggesting that “This [collapse] is inevitable . . . but not disastrous because of the connections left behind” (p. 24). Those remaining “connections,” after a professional development project has ended are of utmost interest to us.
We owe a debt to researchers such as Joe McDonald (and Tom Guskey and Tony Bryk, among others) who have written extensively about the fruits of professional learning and how to make sense of the results. But until recently, we had not considered one relatively easy and powerful way of making sense of “what remains” after a professional learning action space closes.
We might learn a great deal by simply asking teachers new to the school, department, or role to describe the school and departmental culture, as well as its instructional environment. A relative newcomer, a teacher who arrived after the conclusion of a particular professional learning project, might describe the current instructional environment and degree of teacher collegiality in such a way that we could easily compare that description to earlier accounts given by veteran teachers in the school. This simple method might provide an interesting window into “what remains” as the result of previous professional learning. Comparing a new teacher’s description of teaching, learning, and adult collaboration to what a veteran described as past school practices and culture can tell a school leader a great deal about the “connections left behind” after professional learning ends.
Evidence from Brookline Public Schools
We recently stumbled upon this method during a one-day professional learning experience in Brookline Public Schools in MA. We had previously engaged in a four-year disciplinary literacy initiative in Brookline (the “Content-area Reading Initiative” or CRI). When that project first began (in 2011 and 2012), high school teachers described working in isolation, and without a collective sense of how to bolster students’ disciplinary literacy skills. Flash forward to the summer of 2017, when we met a second-year teacher (Evan Mousseau) who described his department and school’s instructional environment with fresh eyes. We were admittedly a bit surprised to hear how different the environment was from when we first stepped foot in the district.
Evan said “I don’t know what the English Department at Brookline High School was like before, or even while my colleagues were doing CRI work; I wasn’t there yet. But I do know that I joined a department that was deeply collaborative and eager to share ideas, best practices, and classroom struggles. Many of those collaborations included colleagues making reference to their CRI work. These references were casual and made with assumed familiarity, making it clear that the work had become folded into the vocabulary of our department and the school at large. Even before I knew what it was, it was clear to me that CRI had a long-term influence on the department I was joining.”
While we collected a great deal of data on the effects of the project from its participants during and immediately after its conclusion, we were heartened by this young teacher’s anecdotes of the teaching and learning environment several years later. It encourages us (and school leaders) to keep collecting data long after a professional learning initiative ends, to better understand how the ripple effects of that professional learning continue to shape teaching and learning. “What remains” after the consultants have left the building can guide teachers and leaders toward their next professional learning project. Newly built professional capacities, even if seemingly dormant for a while, can spur the next action space and become the basis for new professional learning.
Christina L. Dobbs is an assistant professor in Boston University’s School of Education where she teaches courses on English education, writing instruction, and English language learners. Her research focuses on the written academic language of secondary students and the disciplinary literacy training and professional development of teachers. Her research can be found in a variety of journals including the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Reading Research Quarterly, Reading & Writing, and Professional Development in Education.
Megin Charner-Laird is an associate professor at Salem State University’s School of Education. She teaches courses on assessment, qualitative research, and elementary education. A former teacher, her focus is on teachers’ school-based professional learning experiences, teacher leadership, and teachers’ on-the-ground experiences of policy reforms. Megin can be found in a variety of journals including the American Journal of Education, Teachers College Record, The Journal of School Leadership, The Learning Professional, and Professional Development in Education.
Disciplinary literacy and professional development: how to tell whether it left anything behind
Disciplinary literacy is the teaching of reading, writing and communicating in the ways that people in a subject do it, such as the way a historian reads a source or a scientist writes up an experiment. As Christina L. Dobbs and Megin Charner-Laird explain above, they study professional learning that helps middle and high school teachers bring students into those practices, and their question is what remains when the project ends. This section sets their question beside the standard ways of evaluating professional development, and beside what a 2026 federal review says about the research.
A framework for the question “Did it make a difference?”
Thomas Guskey, whom the authors mention, describes five levels at which professional development can be evaluated. A chart published by Learning Forward summarizes them as follows.
- Participants’ reactions. Did participants like it, and was their time well spent? This is gathered with end-of-session questionnaires.
- Participants’ learning. Did they gain the intended knowledge or skill? Tests, demonstrations, reflections and portfolios are typical.
- Organization support and change. Did the school or district back the work with resources, leadership and recognition? Records, meeting minutes, questionnaires and interviews are typical.
- Participants’ use of new knowledge or skills. Are teachers actually applying it? Observations, portfolios and interviews with participants and their supervisors are typical.
- Student learning outcomes. Did student performance, attitudes or behavior change? Student and school records and interviews are typical.
The first two levels can be checked at the end of a session, while the others need time. The Brookline example fits this: the authors collected data from participants during and just after the project, then heard from a newly hired teacher several years later about the department’s culture. In Guskey’s terms, that teacher’s account is evidence at the third and fourth levels, because it describes shared vocabulary and habits among colleagues long after the outside consultants left.
Why the newcomer method is useful and where it stops
The method the authors propose, asking a teacher who arrived after the project to describe the school’s culture and comparing the answer with earlier accounts by veteran teachers, is inexpensive and needs no special instruments. It also has limits. One teacher’s account cannot show that the project caused the culture, and it says little about student results. A school that wants to use the method can strengthen it by asking several newcomers the same questions, by recording the veterans’ accounts before the project begins, and by pairing the interviews with something observable, such as the number of teams that still meet or the use of shared lesson routines.
What a 2026 federal review says about professional development
The U.S. Government Accountability Office published a review in March 2026 of the research on professional development effectiveness. It found that all five meta-analyses it examined associated teacher professional development with higher student test scores, but the research on which features matter is mixed. Duration showed no link to test score effects in any of the four meta-analyses that studied it, and only one of three found a link for a focus on subject-matter knowledge. Of five randomized studies funded by the Education Department, three found no effects on test scores, one found a delayed effect only for programs lasting at least two years, and one found positive effects but was less generalizable. The GAO stresses that these are associations and not proof of cause.
For leaders, the practical reading is that professional development can work on average, that no single design feature guarantees it, and that a school should check its own results. That is what the authors recommend when they encourage leaders to keep collecting data long after an initiative ends.
Questions to ask about disciplinary literacy work in your school
- What would we expect to see in classrooms and in teacher conversations a year after the project ends, and who will look?
- Which of the five levels are we collecting information on, and which are we assuming?
- Have we recorded what the school looked like before the work began, so there is something to compare to?
- Are we asking teachers who joined after the project about it, and are their accounts changing how we plan the next one?
Asking these at the start of a project, and not at the end, makes the evaluation part of the design, and the Learning Forward chart supports this by listing, for each level, how the information will be used to improve the program.
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