What Better Professional Development Actually Looks Like

I want to give you something specific.

Not a philosophy. Not a vision statement. Specific structures you can use.

The professional development research is clearer than most administrators realize. The factors that differentiate effective PD from PD that doesn’t change anything are documented and replicable. What works is harder to implement than what most schools are currently doing.

Here are the structures that research consistently shows matter…

(1) The coaching cycle.

The single highest-leverage PD model we have evidence for is the instructional coaching cycle: a teacher identifies a goal, an instructional coach observes their classroom, they meet to debrief, they identify a change to try, and the cycle repeats. This produces measurable changes in teacher practice when implemented well.

Most schools have instructional coaches.
Many of them are not running full coaching cycles.

Instead they’re doing walk-throughs, giving feedback without follow-up, or being pulled into administrative tasks. If you have coaching capacity, the question is whether it’s being used for the thing that works.