Ineffective PD often part of the problem in low-performing schools
June 22 2009 by 
Hayes Mizell
We all know that teachers in low-performing schools are under tremendous pressures to increase their students' learning. But simply telling them they have to "improve" usually has little effect. Providing more money for new academic intervention programs may at best produce only marginal increases in student achievement. Cascading, multiple remedies intended to fix a school frequently confuse teachers, causing them to lose focus and further dissipate their limited time and energy.
No Child Left Behind requires that schools in "improvement status" must use 10 percent of their Title I funds for "high-quality professional development" that directly addresses "the academic achievement problem that caused the school to be identified for school improvement." But the law does not acknowledge or address the possibility of a professional development problem that may have actually contributed to the school falling into improvement status in the first place.
In many low-performing schools, there is not only too little professional learning, but too much of it is ineffective. Professional development cannot be part of the solution unless it is no longer part of the problem. This is difficult. It's not easy to alter the expectations and practices that contributed to a school's declining teacher and student performance. In spite of low test scores and a poor accountability rating, a school may cling to ineffective modes of professional development simply because it doesn't know better. New learning is the only antidote.
Pursuing a process of intentional learning about high-impact professional development is essential for a low-performing school to improve. The school can begin by organizing learning teams of teachers and administrators who educate themselves about the most effective means of professional development. This will challenge conventional wisdom, because it focuses on educators' learning how to learn before they determine the subject content or instructional method they need to learn. Teachers may balk, but they will be taking the first step towards creating professional learning experiences they can use to lift their school out of improvement status.
Hayes Mizell is NSDC's Distinguished Senior Fellow.
Posted in Hayes Mizell | 
Jun 23, 2009 at 11:22 AM
How can we determine what is indeed 'high-quality professional development'?
How do we assess the impact of professional development on our students' achievement? Can anyone share how their school assesses impact?
Jun 25, 2009 at 8:10 AM
Julie, NSDC's Standards for Staff Development define effective staff development that improves student learning. These Standards have been adopted in part or whole by 25 states in the US. A standards assessment inventory developed and validated by SEDL established a strong correlation between the standards and high levels of student achievement in schools.
We assess the impact of professional development by ensuring our professional development strategy is directly tied to our student achievement goals. We do it by writing a school improvement plan that begins with student achievement goals, determining teacher knowledge and skills essential to achieving the goals, implementing effective professional development to address the educator learning goals, providing support for implementing improvement challenges, monitoring implementation, and assessing impact on student performance.
There are a number of articles that have been published in The Learning Principal and JSD where principals and evaluators retell their success stories and describe how they evaluated the impact of their professional development.
Jun 30, 2009 at 1:10 AM
I agree with Julie's concern and would add that it is hard to find high quality research studies (that show empirical evidence) of a link between a particular teacher professional development programme and related student outcomes. A 2007 best evidence synthesis of teacher professional development studies (Helen Timperley et al.) found there is a paucity of verifiable evidence to support claims made about TPD. I guess the CBAM framework can be used to answer some questions about the quality of a TPD program. Some sort of a matched classes quasi-experimental study with TPD as the intervention might also help to clarify the effectiveness of a particular program. In any case, I would finally add that there is a lot of information about the characteristics of TPD programs that are associated with desirable learner outcomes - content focus, active learning, coherence, duration and collective participation to name a few...
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