Identifying the characteristics of effective teacher professional development: a critical review

ABSTRACT

Several influential reviews and two meta-reviews have converged on the position that teacher professional development (PD) is more effective when it is sustained, collaborative, subject specific, draws on external expertise, has buy-in from teachers, and is practice based. This consensus view has now been incorporated in government policy and official guidance in several countries. This paper reassesses the evidence underpinning the consensus, arguing that the reviews on which it is based have important methodological weaknesses, in that they employ inappropriate inclusion criteria and depend on an invalid inference method. The consensus view is therefore likely to be inaccurate. It is argued that researchers would make more progress identifying characteristics of effective professional development by looking for alignment between evidence from basic research on human skill acquisition and features of rigorously evaluated PD interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional development
• teacher education
• reviews

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sam Sims is a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Education Improvement Science at UCL Institute of Education, UK. He researches education policy and has a particular interest in how teachers’ working environments affect their development and retention in the profession. You can find him on Twitter @DrSamSims.

Harry Fletcher-Wood is an Associate Dean at Ambition Institute, where he trains teacher trainers. He researches pedagogy and professional development and is the author of the book Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice. You can find him on Twitter @HfletcherWood.

Notes

1 It should be noted that, in line with the argument given in the previous two subsections, any apparent similarity between the features of instructional coaching and the consensus view is not, in and of itself, evidence that consensus view is correct.

2 We note that this meta-analysis was published after the meta-reviews by Cordingley et al. (2015) and Dunst et al. (2015). However, many of the original studies cited in Kraft et al. (2018) were published by 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive grants from any funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.