Professional Development

Professional development refers to continuous learning opportunities for teachers. Other terms for professional development include in-service, teacher learning, staff development, and professional learning. Teachers are at the epicenter of discussion and debate over systemwide reform initiatives. Because teachers are critical to student achievement, professional development has become the focal point for supporting teachers in deepening their knowledge and skills. Today, as schools strive to become more focused on learning, professional development includes teachers, support staff, and administrators. The delivery modes of professional development have shifted over the years. As we look at the state of professional development over time, we can characterize these changes as a shift from generic to specific, static to dynamic, solitary to collaborative, individualized to systemic. Optimally, effective professional development offerings should serve the needs of educational reform initiatives and result in improved student performance.

During the 1970s and 1980s, professional development delivery relied on outside expertise for conducting workshops and seminars. In workshops or seminars during this period, teachers usually traveled to off-site locations to listen to information presented by an expert. According to M. S. Garet and colleagues, existing research suggests that this style of passive learning may not translate into effective classroom practice.

These one-time offerings were often generic in nature and disconnected from a teacher's specific classroom and student needs. When considering that the professional development was offered as a single session that lacked follow-up meetings, it is clear that the content of the offering could not be readily integrated with the individual needs of students in a teacher's classroom.

While workshops and/or seminars may be valuable for expanding a teaching repertoire, Lee Shulman's formulation of pedagogical content knowledge has prompted the education community to respect the special knowledge and skills of specific content areas. Math and science teachers, in particular, require professional development that focuses on sustained content and methods training. Thus, professional development offerings have been informed by this research.

The reforms in professional development differ from these traditional offerings to include activities that take place during the school day and rely more on colleagues, rather than outside experts. Professional learning communities, action research, and mentoring/coaching are examples of these reform types of professional development. The descriptions here highlight the unique features of each. Teachers engaged in a professional learning community collaborate and reflect with fellow teachers. Learning through these peer-to-peer interactions and having a shared sense of responsibility for student learning is a departure from the long-held view of the teaching profession as isolated. A growing number of teachers have been pursuing these questions with their own students through action research. Action research is a form of professional development in which the teacher is engaged in continuous learning through the inquiry process. Mentoring and/or coaching involves observation and ongoing communication with other teachers. Numerous districts now have formalized programs with financial incentives for teachers to serve as mentors or coaches for novice teachers in order to help retain first-year teachers.

Since the late 1980s, professional development schools, collaborations between K-12 schools and universities, have offered a natural multipronged strategy for professional development. These schools are often referred to as “teaching hospitals” in that they offer a clinical setting for pre-service teacher preparation programs. In addition [Page 731]to assisting pre-service teachers with their development, professional development schools provide an opportunity for experienced teachers to expand their responsibilities through being mentors for pre-service teachers and communicating directly with university researchers.

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