A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Features of Professional Development That Promote Improvements in Teaching

We used our national probability sample of teachers who participated in Eisenhower-assisted professional development to estimate the strength of the relationships among features of the professional development and self-reported teacher outcomes—enhanced knowledge and skills and changed teaching practice.

• Activities with the six features of high quality—reform type, duration, collective participation, content focus, active learning, and coherence—promote better self-reported outcomes for teachers than other activities.
• The results provide empirical support for the contention that professional development that emphasizes content knowledge, active learning, and coherence leads to teachers reporting enhanced knowledge and skill and changes in teaching practices. (See Exhibit ES.3.)
• The results also show that activities of longer duration and activities that encourage collective participation of teachers tend to place more emphasis on content than other activities, provide more opportunities for active learning, and provide more coherent professional development. These features in turn promote positive teacher outcomes. Thus, our results suggest that the emphasis in the legislation on sustained and intensive professional development is appropriate.
• As suggested in the literature on professional development, reform types of activities tend to produce more positive reported outcomes than traditional types, but our results indicate that this effect is largely indirect. That is, reform activities tend to produce better outcomes primarily because they tend to be of longer duration. Traditional and reform activities of the same duration tend to have the same effects on reported outcomes.
• Our analyses show that the difference between districts and SAHE grantees in reported enhancement of knowledge and skills and reported change in teaching practice is explained almost entirely by the fact that SAHE grantees place a greater emphasis upon duration, subject-matter content, active learning, and coherence. In short, if districts placed a greater emphasis upon these characteristics, we hypothesize that teachers would report their knowledge and skill enhanced to the same extent as teachers in SAHE-supported activities, and that they would be just as likely to report changing their teaching practice.

Exhibit ES.3

[The Quality of Eisenhower-assisted Activities]

[District Management of Eisenhower-assisted Activities ]