Students and teachers should strive for a meaningful learning experience. However this is an ambitious vision for learning and teaching. Investments in professional development have often been ineffective. What are some common challenges schools and teachers face in their professional development and how can we tackle this?

Professional development plans are not ambitious enough

Oftentimes professional development programmes are designed in silo, without a broader vision of how these teaching practices and concepts benefit student learning. 

Schools should plan a roadmap for professional development to keep efforts focused. This includes having an instructional vision that prioritizes the school’s goals for student learning, as well as what teachers should do to support them. For example, if one of the school’s instructional visions is to promote inclusivity, teachers’ professional development efforts should aim to disrupt stereotypes and encourage more engagement from students. 

Not cultivating ownership 

Teachers need to feel a sense of autonomy and ownership over their students’ learning in order to be more engaged themselves. Professional development opportunities should support teachers in identifying their own goals and how they plan to pursue them. When teachers work on improving their work together, they can make collective choices for their long-term professional development.

Disconnect from the classroom and has no continuity

Effective professional development takes time. Schools will not achieve their goals with short-term, or one-off training for teachers, much like how touch-and-go lessons will not serve effective for students. Instead, connect teachers’ learning with real-world classroom applications over longer periods of time. After undergoing training, teachers can apply their learnings in the classroom and evaluate how the application went. Similar to how gym-goers record themselves working out on their phone, teachers can record short clips of themselves in class (of course protecting student confidentiality) to review their work, find recurring gaps in their “performance” and find ways to improve. 

One-size fits all professional development does not acknowledge each individual’s learning needs

Professional development is most effective when it supports teachers to develop practices specific to their areas of expertise – math, science, languages, arts – the nuances required to teach these subjects cannot be covered by non-differentiated training. Even within specific subjects, different teachers will have different needs depending on their prior experiences and character. To do this, professional development should require teachers to take charge of their own training by setting their own goals, defining their own problems of practice, or practicing making instructional plans. 

Professional development is not collaborative

Collaborative learning has been shown to improve knowledge retention, develop higher-level thinking skills and greater ownership over one’s learning. How can schools support teachers’ professional development by encouraging productive collaboration? Can we pair teachers with differing expertise who can support each other in professional development? A recent study showed that such a model led to improvements in both teacher practice and student learning (during the study, the teachers also had the autonomy to choose how best to spend their time together). 

To aim high for its students, schools need to do the same for its teachers. Professional development requires time, attention to each teacher’s specific needs and offering differentiated support. 

With effective professional development potentially being a challenge, any aid possible in school would help them carry out their jobs a little better, and perhaps give them more time to focus on professional development. Aids such as school management systems - increasingly common in a digital-first world - would reduce time taken for tedious tasks and administrative matters, allowing teachers to, well, teach. 

For example, LittleLives not only helps schools monitor and analyze data related to students, staff, parents and daily administration, but also offers an intuitive school communication platform for teachers and parents to keep one another updated. 

If you would like to find out more, talk to LittleLives at sales@littlelives.com!