Keys to Effective Professional Development

In this thoughtful Kappan column, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo asks why professional development so rarely improves teaching practice, and shares three lessons he’s learned as a school leader:

• Abstraction never leads to action. The first step with a PD session is to define the objective in terms of concrete actions teachers will take in their classrooms. “Until you name an outcome, your workshop doesn’t have teeth,” says Bambrick-Santoyo. For example, planning a workshop on diversity, here are three possible objectives:

• Abstract: Be aware of the diversity of our students and the experiences they have had.
• Still too abstract: Understand the current political and social challenges of our community and how they affect our students.
• Actionable: Redirect a noncompliant student with one of the three nonbiased strategies presented in the workshop.

Actionable objectives should also be observable in classrooms so administrators can keep track of whether they are implemented effectively. 

• Bite-sized is best. “Once you start breaking down your PD topic into actionable objectives, you’ll soon realize that there are far too many to teach all at once,” says Bambrick-Santoyo. “A PD session should never have more objectives than you can accomplish in the amount of time allotted.” Better to take one bite-sized objective for each session and accomplish the broader goal over time. Here’s an illustration:

• Very broad: Teachers being Common Core ready;
• Narrower: Effectively teaching more-complex texts;
• Narrower still: Using a “ladder” of texts within a specific topic; teachers select a set of increasingly complex texts on the same topic so that students will evolve more quickly as readers by staying within a topic and applying their new learning to more-complex texts on the same material.
• Optimal: Teachers find three informational texts on a topic in the novel they are reading with students, each passage at a higher Lexile level. Teachers then work in grade-level teams to exchange feedback on their text choices and begin to design a lesson plan.

Bambrick-Santoyo also suggests some common-sense strategies for improving the quality of professional development: (a) Make PD routine; weekly or bi-weekly is best. (b) Make PD sessions longer; this is possible only if students are dismissed early on PD days. And (c) Make hard choices. “Because you can’t address everything,” he says, “always select your PD objectives with an eye to what’s most urgent and what actions will have the biggest effect.”

• To see change, practice. Teachers need high-quality practice opportunities if they are going to have the skill and confidence to implement new skills. Bambrick-Santoyo recommends:

• Repetition – “The more ‘at bats’ and opportunities teachers have, the more deeply they can learn a skill,” he says.
• Feedback – As teachers practice, peers and administrators should say how they are doing. 
• Immediacy – Practice should take place right in the PD session; it’s unrealistic to expect teachers to go off and practice on their own. In the diversity PD example above, teachers get a series of written classroom scenarios in which a student acts out and the teacher responds inappropriately; then teachers rewrite the responses and role-play to see how their ideas work. 

“Leading Effective PD: From Abstraction to Action” by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in Phi Delta Kappan, April 2013 (Vol. 94, #7, p. 70-71), www.kappanmagazine.com; the author can be reached at pbambrick@uncommonschools.org. 

From the Marshall Memo #482