No part of this may be reproduced in any form — except for brief quotation (not to exceed 1,000 words) in a review or professional work — without prior written permission from NSDC or the authors. D ecades of standards-based school reform have helped identify what students need to know and be able to do. In the words of former IBM CEO Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., these efforts were meant to " drive standards [and accountability] through the schoolhouse door. " But educators and policymakers are recognizing that it is time for Standards-Based Reform 2.0. We need to place a greater priority on strengthening the capacity of educators and building learning communities to deliver higher standards for every child. Enabling educational systems to achieve on a wide scale the kind of teaching that has a substantial impact on student learning requires much more intensive and effective professional learning than has traditionally been available. If we want all young people to possess the higher-order thinking skills they need to succeed in the 21st century, we need educators who possess higher-order teaching skills and deep content knowledge. There are many ways to improve the quality and performance of the nation's education workforce, and many are being tested. States and districts have restructured the staffs at thousands of failing schools. They are seeking to lure better talent into classrooms by recruiting career changers and liberal-arts graduates with rich content knowledge and a willingness to teach. They are revamping their personnel departments, launching new teacher academies, and working to exert greater control over who will teach and in which schools. But these efforts, essential as they are, influence only a small portion of educators. And no matter what states and districts do to bolster the education workforce, they will need to do more and better with the talent they have. This will require a more effective and systematic approach to supporting, developing, and mobilizing the more than three million educators who will teach in and lead our schools. Other fields, from medicine and management to the military, do a far better job of providing ongoing learning opportunities and support for their professionals. But as this report shows, in education, professional learning in its current state is poorly conceived and deeply flawed. Teachers lack time and opportunities to view each other's classrooms, learn from mentors, and work collaboratively. The support and training they receive is …

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Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad.

Este documento revisa 35 estudios meticulosos que han demostrado un vinculo positivo entre el desarrollo profesional docente, las practicas docentes y los resultados academicos de los estudiantes. Se identificaron caracteristicas principales de iniciativas efectivas y se ofrecen descripciones completas de estos modelos para informar a los dirigentes educativos y formuladores de politicas que buscan potenciar el desarrollo profesional para mejorar el aprendizaje escolar.

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Effective Teacher Professional Development.

TIMSS 2011 International Results in Mathematics.

hat do we really know about the relationship between professional development and improvements in student learning? What evidence validates that relationship, and how trustworthy is that evidence? What does that evidence tell us about the characteristics of truly effective professional development activities? These questions guided one of the largest and most inclusive syntheses of research on effective professional development conducted to date. Scholars from the American Institutes for Research analyzed findings from over 1,300 studies that potentially address the effect of professional development on student learning outcomes. The project was sponsored by the Regional Education Laboratory-Southwest (REL SW) and funded by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. The findings from this comprehensive analysis, titled Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement (Yoon et al. 2007), shed new light on the complex relationship between professional development and improvements in student learning. It is hoped that they also will lead to new and better research on this vitally important dimension of the educational improvement What Works in Professional Development?

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What Works in Professional Development

Professional development programs are based on different theories of how students learn and different theories of how teachers learn. Reviewers often sort programs according to design features such as program duration, intensity, or the use of specific techniques such as coaches or online lessons, but these categories do not illuminate the programs’ underlying purpose or premises about teaching and teacher learning. This review sorts programs according to their underlying theories of action, which include (a) a main idea that teachers should learn and (b) a strategy for helping teachers enact that idea within their own ongoing systems of practice. Using rigorous research design standards, the review identifies 28 studies. Because studies differ in multiple ways, the review presents program effects graphically rather than statistically. Visual patterns suggest that many popular design features are not associated with program effectiveness. Furthermore, different main ideas are not differentially effective....

How Does Professional Development Improve Teaching

Summary Of the more than 1,300 studies identi-fied as potentially addressing the effect of teacher professional development on student achievement in three key con-tent areas, nine meet What Works Clear-inghouse evidence standards, attesting to the paucity of rigorous studies that directly examine this link. This report finds that teachers who receive sub-stantial professional development—an average of 49 hours in the nine studies—can boost their students’ achievement by about 21 percentile points. How does teacher professional development affect student achievement? The connection seems intuitive. But demonstrating it is difficult. Examining more than 1,300 studies identified as potentially addressing the effect of teacher professional development on student achieve-ment in three key content areas, this report finds nine that meet What Works Clearing-house evidence standards. That only nine meet standards attests to the paucity of rigorous studies that directly assess the effect of in-service teacher professional development on student achievement in mathematics, science, and reading and English/language arts.But the results of those studies—that average control group students would have increased their achievement by 21 percentile points if their teacher had received substantial profes-sional development—indicates that provid-ing professional development to teachers had a moderate effect on student achievement across the nine studies. The effect size was fairly consistent across the three content areas reviewed. All nine studies focused on elementary school teachers and their students. About half fo-cused on lower elementary grades (kindergar-ten and first grade), and about half on upper elementary grades (fourth and fifth grades).Six studies were published in peer-reviewed journals; three were unpublished doctoral dissertations. The studies were not particularly recent, ranging from 1986 to 2003.Five studies were randomized controlled trials that meet evidence standards without reserva-tions. Four studies meet evidence standards with reservations (one randomized controlled trial with group equivalence problems and three quasi-experimental designs).Four focused on student achievement in read-ing and English/language arts—unsurprising given the large literature in this content area. Two studies focused on mathemat-ics, two on mathematics and reading and

https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/southwest/pdf/rel_2007033_sum.pdf

Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement

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Beth Scarloss

Papers

Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement

Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement. Issues & Answers. REL 2007-No. 033.