On the problems with professional learning

and why it's probably not working

From The Mirage report. I wonder if this reflects teachers in Australia too.

In many professions, ongoing learning is a given. Professions like law and medicine change with new developments, policies and research. So, too, does teaching. Unfortunately, much of the prefab professional learning that schools adopt turns out eventually to be just another fad. Take for example Thinking Routines, VAK, also known as learning styles, and Brain Gym. Teachers generally don’t have the time to wade through much of the dross of educational research. Schools in the past have tended to go for neatly boxed-up programs so they can call themselves a Deep Learning school or whatever the current trend is. It’s no wonder teachers have a distrust of shiny new things. 

Why do we need professional learning anyway? Well, the Strong Beginnings report shone a light onto the deeply entrenched deficiencies in initial teacher education (ITE) in Australia. It echoed what was made clear in the many previous reviews of ITE in Australia, but went as far as defining what graduate teachers need to know. It’s hoped that this will finally make an impact but just this morning, a prominent initial teacher education provider was trying to sell me project-based learning and restorative justice. So until we see changes, schools are, for many, the main provider of sensible advice about teaching, be that through internal means or the judicious selection of consultants and product training.

There’s been some effort put into trying to define what makes effective professional learning. Linda Darling-Hammond’s (2017) review of effective professional learning has received almost 6,000 citations. It lists seven neat features derived from the common elements of successful programs. Here’s the ostensible secret sauce:

Effective professional learning 

1. Is content focused 

2. Incorporates active learning utilising adult learning theory 

3. Supports collaboration, typically in job-embedded contexts 

4. Uses models and modelling of effective practice 

5. Provides coaching and expert support 

6. Offers opportunities for feedback and reflection 

7. Is of sustained duration

But, if we dig a bit deeper, we might notice for example that adult learning theory has an extremely weak evidence base — I would extend that to no evidence base if in an ungenerous mood. The coaching and expert support sounds wonderful but is incredibly expensive, with some programs utilising a remote mentor. It seems many programs are conducted by the researchers themselves, which is not feasible for many schools. Not only this, there may be a whole-school Hawthorne effect at play. Professional learning that is ‘of sustained duration’ in the cases studied often runs into several weeks, time many schools simply do not have¹. And the final seed of doubt for me is planted by the inclusion of Reading Recovery as a standout example. 

What this review should say is, “Pick one thing and put all your professional learning resources behind it.” Anecdotally, I know this approach to be effective. I recently presented at Australia’s largest grassroots network conference, Sharing Best Practice, and heard turnaround-principal Manisha Gazula speak for about the fifth time. She has played the long game, focusing on one to two aspects of curriculum and instruction at a time. Speak to David MacSporran at Yates Avenue and he will say the same thing. Both schools have benefited from consistent leadership and relentless focus for several years. Even in my own experience, my school partnered with the Australian Education Research Organisation on a year-long project to develop a whole-school writing framework with a year of professional learning. Our NAPLAN writing scores shot up — who knew?

This approach takes moral courage and conflicts with the pick-n-mix approach to professional learning taken by so many schools. But what if we want to design a bespoke approach for our context? What are the essential ingredients? I’m not the only person to question the palatable but way oversimplified Darling-Hammond. Sam Sims and friends (2021 and 2023) aimed to isolate the elements of effective professional learning. They came up with four ingredients, seen in the table below. There is some crossover with Darling-Hammond, mainly in the form of professional learning being job-embedded with coaching.

Thanks to Natalie Wexler’s excellent Substack, I was put onto this depressing TNTP report into professional learning and the billions (not a typo) spent in just three districts in the US. They found no ROI in the form of improved student outcomes, and more interestingly, little that identified improving teachers compared to non-improvers. On nearly all measures, from hours spent, to believing that professional learning improves practice, most differences were negligible. The one significant difference was that improvers rated their classroom performance the same as their formal evaluations, while non-improvers rated themselves more strongly. 

Could this possibly be evidence of a growth mindset in teachers? Could it be professional humility and a growth culture? The same report profiles one Charter Management Organisation (CMO) that is bucking the trend. What the authors find here seems to back my hunch. Continuous learning and high expectations are the norm here. They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast and that’s all very true until other priorities get in the way. At this CMO, however, roles are well defined, as are instructional expectations. Coaching cycles are routine and well-funded. Importantly, the professional humility and internalised expectation of growth is more present in this CMO than in the others studied. 

What if investment in coaching is the mechanism by which we drive not only professional knowledge about the granular instructional practices that make a difference, but the stimulus for professional humility? Coaching is grounded in the assumption that there is always an element of practice to work on. We recently signed our coaches up to Steplab; the impetus was, I think, evidence of their humility. Our team had engaged in a year-long program of professional learning to develop their explicit practice, but when it came to coaching others, they wanted assurance that they were giving the best possible advice. They requested that we sign up to Steplab to use it as a library of practice, so that when they gave advice to their coachees, they were able to draw on the most specific models available. 

Investigating and writing this piece has left me with the feeling that there are no short-cuts to effective professional learning, and even then, it may not yield the hoped-for outcomes. Reflective practice seems to be the gatekeeper to improvement. I often say that I’m never happy with how I taught a class. Every class could have been better. That’s not to say that teachers should browbeat themselves, but teaching is so complex that it’s naive — or arrogant — to think we are regularly nailing it. But even the most humble and earnest teacher won’t get far without focused instructional leadership. One thing that all studies have in common is that the scattergun approach is not working. 

1. By the way, NESA interprets this as anything above 1.5 hours