The Finance Project: 2001 Professional Development in Context

This paper is part of an effort undertaken by The Finance Project to bring coherence to the fragmented and still emerging field of professional development for educators and, in so doing, to build greater understanding of what makes professional development effective. It seeks to inform not only the practice of educators in the classroom and the administrators that assist them but also decisions made by foundations and by policymakers, whose knowledge of and support for effectively designed professional development is critical to its dissemination, implementation and success.

For the last two decades, since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, America’s public schools have undergone successive waves of reform. Improving the capacity of educators to better meet the needs of students has been central to most of these efforts. The work of many organizations, including the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, begun in the 1990s and continuing today, has reinforced the belief that improving teachers’ knowledge and skills must be at the core of any strategy to improve student learning. The growing knowledge of how teachers shape student learning has converged with another force – the standards-based reform movement – which has given particularly urgency to the need to understand professional development and what makes it effective. Virtually every district and every state has begun the march toward standards-based reform, the foundation of which is the belief that every child can learn to the same high academic standards and that teachers possess, or ought to, the knowledge and skills to get students there. These standards are accompanied by strict accountability measures; districts, schools and, in some places, administrators and teachers can be sanctioned if students do not reach those standards. For everyone involved in public education, from students to superintendents, the stakes have never been higher.

As a result, considerable time, energy and funds have been invested in professional development for educators. Despite this influx of resources as well as the growing attention being paid to professional development by the research community, our knowledge about professional development – including, among other things, what makes it effective both in content and form, its cost, how context shapes its delivery and success – is fragmented.

This fragmentation reflects and is reflected by the tremendous diversity in professional development programs or strategies. Professional development is conducted under a variety of auspices – schools, districts, states, professional associations, and universities, either individually or, increasingly, through collaboration between them. The purpose of these programs varies from familiarizing educators with new state or district requirements, improving curriculum or specific instructional techniques, sensitizing educators to approaches to reform, and much more.

Professional development is also delivered through a wide-ranging variety of mechanisms. Duration varies from “one-shot” presentations lasting less than a day to multi-day experiences that occur at various intervals over a year or longer. Some offerings rely on the traditional lecture format while others eschew it, instead using structured exercises, learning teams or other cooperative activities designed to help participants construct their own knowledge.

Similarly, funding for professional development comes from divergent sources including federal, state or local governments, philanthropic groups, and the participants themselves. Tracking funding sources, particularly when there are multiple sources, is difficult and few professional development providers do it well. Even more difficult is determining the true cost of professional development. Many initiatives define cost by the funds available. Others consider cost to be the price charged to participants. Providers often do not take into account, or have difficulty determining, such items as development costs, indirect costs including rent for facilities, in kind contributions, release time for participants, and technology. This lack of information makes it very difficult to fairly compare programs or to fully understand what would be required to take them to scale across a district or state.

This paper reviews selected literature on professional development and considers the progress the research community has made in understanding and assessing professional development and identifying areas that need continued exploration. The literature review also yielded a summary of characteristics of professional development programs that research has shown led to changes in teacher knowledge and practice if not improvements in student achievement.

Research on professional development has been underway for several decades and, though not yet complete, it is evident that programs that successfully change teacher practice often share some attributes. These include, but are not limited to, extended duration, collaborative learning experiences, adherence to a philosophy of continuous reflection and learning, multiple contacts which allow for trial of and feedback on new techniques, and a content that is responsive to teachers’ concerns and requests rather than one which is dictated to them.

Recent research is beginning to indicate that, however important the form professional development programs take, their content is at least as important. Researchers are exploring the efficacy of focusing on subject area knowledge as well as how children learn specific subject areas. They are also considering how closely the curriculum of professional development programs should be linked to the curriculum of students. The research community is learning, as well, that the context in which these programs operate significantly shapes their success and they are beginning to explore questions of context and of implementation. These are only some of the questions researchers and practitioners are sifting through, and the answers have not yet emerged.

Because so much remains to be learned about what makes specific professional development strategies effective, and because those strategies cannot be considered separate from the contexts in which they operate, the literature may be best used, at this point, to identify practices that are ineffective and to point the way toward practices that appear promising. It does not yet offer a guaranteed prescription for effective professional development.

At the same time as it undertook the literature review, The Finance Project also initiated a scan of programs widely regarded as promising. These programs, identified by experts and frequently cited as models of what professional develop should look like, vary dramatically in form, content and purpose. The Finance Project did not evaluate them for their effectiveness, although several had sought independent review of their work to understand how it may affect student achievement. Instead, the scan was an opportunity to understand the philosophy and design of these programs as well as to identify characteristics that influence their success. In preparing the scan, Finance Project staff and consultants reviewed program materials and conducted extensive interviews with program directors. From this process, we culled a list of characteristics that appear central to the programs’ effectiveness. The characteristics that have resulted in recognition for these programs are:

Some of these characteristics conform to, and in some instances the design of scanned programs was driven by, the literature. Some programs, however, have forged ahead of the literature and explored new philosophies about and strategies for professional development. As practitioners continue to try new innovations, as research on them continues, and as the literature grows, this list of critical ingredients will assuredly expand.

Most of the characteristics listed above, and those identified in the literature, focus on specific components of discrete programs. They relate less to the organizational capacity to consider professional development in a larger context of systemic change. Yet the success of professional development efforts to improve student learning is, to a large degree, grounded in a vision of systemic change and an understanding of professional development’s place in realizing that vision.

The need for more extensive organizational capacity is powerfully apparent in the lack of essential knowledge most organizations display regarding both the financing and costs of professional development. The programs reviewed as part of the scan were not unique in this. As with most other professional development initiatives, they were unable to provide detailed information about the full cost of their activities.

Without real appreciation of actual cost, organizational capacity is compromised. The possibility of bringing programs to scale and of sustaining them is rendered remote. With an undeveloped understanding of the magnitude of the investment required to disseminate an effort, it is difficult to attract such investment, and, even if successful in generating an initial investment, it is difficult for providers – such as districts – to plan appropriately for the continuation of an effort in the absence of the investor.

begins with a clear understanding of available financing sources, their potential uses and their limitations. It is evident that private funding sources – while having a critical role in stimulating the creation of and adding value to comprehensive professional development initiatives – are not adequate to support such initiatives at the duration, intensity and scale that the literature and feedback from program providers and participants indicate are essential to transforming teaching and learning. The success of privately-supported efforts may ultimately rest on their ability to engender public investment in programs that are not only effectively designed but are effective in producing increases in educators’ capacities that in turn positively affect student outcomes.

An operative theory of resources, then, must look to public support and consider how best to engender and use this support. Accessing public funds, in turn, requires two other attributes. The first is the ability to demonstrate results. Few programs have implemented assessment measures to gauge changes in teacher practice; fewer still have implemented measures to connect changes in practice to improvements in student learning. Such steps are essential for generating public support for continued and increased investment in learning for educators.

The second attribute is the ability to communicate the importance of continuous learning for educators and its impact on students to the public and to policymakers. Increased public investment in training for educators – who many already regard as sufficiently well-educated – requires public support and political will. They will not come in the absence of a greatly expanded understanding of the pivotal role of professional development in improving outcomes for students.

Professional development is a complex endeavor. Understanding its elements, mastering its implementation and considering its impacts involve continual reflection and analysis. This effort – reviewing the literature, scanning highly-regarded professional development programs, and synthesizing learnings drawn from each – is a first and critical step toward transforming a group of detached efforts into a flourishing field. For discrete professional development initiatives to evolve into a field, the initiatives themselves must be linked by their focus on transforming individuals, schools and districts. Transformative professional development is, at its core, systemic and rooted in what we know about effective design. It is:

transformative professional development and we must continue to explore new innovations and undertake additional research to increase our understanding of how adult learning – and the environment it occurs in – influences and can improve student learning. We must also develop the tools and provide technical assistance to schools, districts and other providers to help them transfer research and emerging knowledge into effective practice. In so doing, we will begin turning a frontier into a field.