Designing effective professional development

Learn that…

1. Teaching quality is a crucial factor in raising pupil attainment.
2. Helping teachers improve through evidence-based professional development that is explicitly focused on improving classroom teaching can be a cost-effective way to improve pupils’ academic outcomes when compared with other interventions, and can narrow the disadvantage attainment gap.
3. Effective professional development is likely to involve a lasting change in teachers’ capabilities or understanding so that their teaching changes.
4. Professional development should be developed using a clear theory of change, where facilitators understand what the intended educational outcomes for teachers are, and how these will subsequently impact pupil outcomes. Ideally, they should check whether teachers learn what was intended.
5. Whilst professional development may need to be sustained over time, what the time is used for, is more important than the amount.
6. More effective professional development is likely to be designed to build on the existing knowledge, skills and understanding of participants.
7. The content of professional development programmes should be based on the best available evidence on effective pedagogies and classroom interventions and aim to enhance capabilities and understanding in order to improve pupil outcomes.
8. Teachers are more likely to improve if they feel that they working within a supportive professional environment, where both trust and high professional standards are maintained.
9. Supportive environments include having the time and resource to undertake relevant professional development and collaborate with peers, and the provision of feedback to enable teachers to improve. They also include receiving support from school leadership, both in addressing concerns and in maintaining standards for pupil behaviour.

Learn how to…

Select evidence-based approaches and design effective professional development by:

• Ensuring any professional development is focused on a shared responsibility for improving outcomes for all pupils.
• Involving colleagues (particularly school leaders) in the selection of professional development priorities and approaches to ensure alignment with wider school improvement priorities.
• Diagnosing what teachers know and can do; starting professional development from that point and adapting the approach based on the teachers’ developing expertise, and applying an understanding of the typical differences between novice and expert teachers.
• Identifying and focussing on the essential knowledge, skills and concepts of teaching a particular subject within a particular phase/domain and then planning activities that focus teachers’ thinking on these essential components.
• Sequencing and revisiting components to ensure all teachers secure foundational knowledge before encountering more complex content.
• Anticipating teacher misconceptions (e.g. about how pupils learn or effective teaching).
• Breaking down complex CPD objectives into constituent components and scaffolding tasks around them, whilst ensuring that teachers can reconstruct the components back into a whole through their understanding of the underlying principles behind a particular approach.
• Aligning professional development with subject, phase and domain specific curriculum materials to ensure generic components are applied appropriately across the curriculum.
• Using assessment information to check whether teachers learned what was intended; are implementing the intended approaches; whether it is having the intended impact upon pupils; and whether curricula are being adapted and improved over time as a result, as aligned to school improvement priorities.
• Drawing on sources of external expertise alongside internal expertise – particularly where that expertise supports improvement in subject knowledge.

Avoid creating unnecessary workload by:

• Making use of well-designed frameworks and resources instead of creating new resources (e.g. sources of subject knowledge, the Early Career Framework and associated core induction programme for early career teachers, ITT Core Content Framework, suite of National Professional Qualifications).
• Ensuring that any professional development time is used productively and that colleagues perceive the relevance to their work.

Avoid common teacher assessment pitfalls by designing approaches that:

• Ensure formative assessment tasks are linked to intended outcomes.
• Draw conclusions about what teachers have learned by reviewing patterns of performance over a number of assessments.
• Use multiple methods of data collection in order to make inferences about teacher quality.

The text above is taken from the NPQ – Leading Teacher Development Framework. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.