Discover what teacher professional development is, what the research says about how to do it effectively, and how Qualtrics can assist you in ensuring that your school system provides adequate opportunities for teachers to improve professionally. Professional growth is essential in any sector, but none more so than education. After all, who knows the importance of education better than teachers?
But the learning process for teachers has gotten much more attention than in many other professions because it can affect how well students learn, how the classroom is run, and several other important key performance indicators. Please keep reading to learn more about what teacher professional development is, what research says about how to do it well, and how Qualtrics could help your school system make sure teachers have many chances to grow professionally.
What is teacher professional development?
Professional development for teachers includes programs and activities that help them improve their teaching knowledge, skills, and expertise. These programs and activities can be self-directed or directed. It can take many different forms, such as ongoing lessons, regular seminars or workshops, in-class observations, collaborative learning sessions, or support groups.
How does teacher training promote learning?
Many educational institutions place a high value on the quality and availability of professional development opportunities for teachers, and for a good reason: research shows that growth and development are key drivers of the teacher experience. This eventually affects both the students and the institution’s overall success by having an impact on numerous crucial factors:
Retention: When instructors stay in their schools, the entire educational system benefits by saving money on recruitment and training costs, implementing effective policy changes, reaching out to underserved groups, and more. Teachers are engaged when they feel like they belong and are making a difference, and not getting enough attention is one of the main reasons they switch schools or leave teaching altogether.
Academic performance: It’s simple: teachers are accountable for giving quality education to their students. They must be able to plan and carry out a great curriculum that helps students get ready for the next step in their education.
Mental health and well-being: Teaching can be a very demanding job, so it’s important to get regular feedback on educators’ mental health and give them access to tools that can help.
Culture: When teachers are happy and practical, they are more likely to give off a sense of confidence, optimism, and power, which makes for a good business culture as a whole.
Financial effects: Improving the teaching experience to reduce turnover can positively affect the budget allocation and save money by avoiding extra costs related to hiring and training.
What factors contribute to good teacher development?
So, how can you ensure that your school system provides adequate and relevant opportunities for professional teacher development? In this section, we will look at the essential characteristics of good teacher professional development, as well as some principles for assessing and tracking the outcomes of your projects.
Effective teacher professional development, according to the Learning Policy Institute:
1. Is concerned with substance
Teacher professional development that is successful focuses on teaching practices related to specific curricular content that enhances teacher learning within their classroom contexts.
2. Employs adult learning theory to incorporate active learning.
Teachers can solve problems in their everyday work by getting hands-on experience making and using new teaching strategies and skills.
3. Encourages collaboration, typically in job-related circumstances
Teachers often learn through “job-embedded” situations that connect new teaching methods to their students and classrooms. These situations allow teachers to share and contribute ideas, which is an important part of “active learning.”
4. Makes use of models and models of effective practice
Good teacher learning means having access to lesson plans, unit plans, samples of student work, observations of peer teachers, and written or video examples of good teaching.
5. Offers guidance and skilled assistance
School leaders should have master teachers and specialists who can share their specific knowledge with teachers as one-on-one coaches in the classroom, leaders of group workshops, or remote mentors who talk to teachers through technology.
6. Provides opportunities for feedback and introspection
Teachers must have time to think about, receive input, and change their practice to grow professionally.
7. Maintains a consistent duration
Finally, an effective teacher development program gives teachers enough time (weeks, months, and years) to learn, practice, implement, and reflect on new strategies that help them change their course.
How can you tell if professional development is having an effect?
Focusing on element 6 of the seven listed above is one of the most effective ways to determine whether your teacher’s professional development activities are practical: Feedback and reflection opportunities.
This has two components:
- Feedback on teachers’ teaching performance from students and peers
- Feedback from teachers on the effectiveness of teacher professional development for institution leaders
Qualtrics can help with both of these things through a variety of assessment tools, such as the ones below:
Student satisfaction surveys: Questionnaires that assess how satisfied students are with their educational experience, offering a measurable standard on topics such as coursework, learning environment, and access to academic resources.
Teacher engagement platform: A comprehensive platform that identifies every experience necessary for your teachers and automatically gives real-time insights to leadership teams so they can act.
Classroom feedback: Software lets teachers take action and close experience gaps by using real-time analysis of the most important factors that affect how students learn at the district, school, department, and classroom levels.
360 Degree Development: A multi-dimensional development tool solicits confidential, anonymous input on various workplace competencies from a teacher’s staff support team, including administrators and peers. It uses powerful real-time analytics and AI to help make decisions about strategies, professional development, and the whole system.
4 Reasons Teacher Development Matters
1. Go Above and Beyond Subject Matter Expertise
Few people would think that a history lesson that ended at the end of the 20th century was up-to-date, but less attention is paid to how often schools update the lessons they teach.
We believe that “curriculum” includes concepts and techniques for teaching in addition to subject matter knowledge. Teachers should always be on the lookout for new ways to get their students interested, such as using the latest innovations in their field or working with people from other fields to look at a problem from many different perspectives.
For example, Daniel Pink’s Drive inspired one of our English teachers earlier this year to explore ways to enhance students’ enthusiasm to learn. This led to the creation of TDW’s very successful Genius Hour, in which our seventh-grade students spent 60 minutes a week on a learning opportunity of their choice and then shared what they had learned at the end of the course.
Even though it’s important for teachers to know about the latest developments in their field, it’s even more important for them to learn new ways to help their students succeed.
2. Enhance Student Outcomes
Consider how different the world would be if we still used steamships to cross the seas. Teaching, like transportation, changes as researchers and practitioners discover more effective ways to reach pupils. However, many schools use antiquated, inadequate teaching and assessment practices.
Teachers should always look for more effective ways to help students learn and more creative and engaging ways to assess their learning. In fact, at TDW, we’re always looking for new ways to improve our curriculum, whether experimenting with language immersion in our Lower School or incorporating the IB Learner Profile into our curriculum to help students develop the skills needed to succeed in a global environment. In addition, we encourage educators to identify ways to take risks to provide meaningful, challenging, and relevant learning experiences for all students. To do this, we encourage shared professional reading and professional action research in our classrooms to improve and evaluate the quality of our teaching and learning in each school.
At TDW, we strive to improve student outcomes through continual assessment. Assessment not only shows where students are in the learning process, but it also helps teachers better understand their students as learners. The TDW teachers then use the assessment results to change how they teach to help their students improve.
3. Incorporate New Technology
A school cannot teach pupils to use future tools if it continues to employ old technologies. That is why, at TDW, we bring cutting-edge technology like 3D printers for students to use and teach 21st-century skills such as coding. However, while introducing new technologies, teacher development is crucial. Educators must not only know how to use technology in the classroom well enough to teach kids, but they must also be able to integrate the technology into a unit of inquiry so that students learn to think and create while learning the technology.
TDW believes it is critical to challenge teachers to move beyond utilizing technology for the sake of using it. Instead, we challenge our teachers to discover ways to incorporate technology into the curriculum to improve teaching and learning (when appropriate). A TDW schoolteacher, for example, pushed third and fourth-grade children to design keychains that they might sell to younger students in a recent 3D printing course. As a result, students not only learned how to create with 3D printers, but they also received entrepreneurial experience.
4. Assist each other in becoming better educators.
Nobody knows the issues teachers confront in the classroom better than other teachers, which is why cooperation is essential to teacher professional development. When teachers help and learn from each other, like in our Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) at TDW, they can share their experiences and research, evaluate each other’s learning activities in the classroom, and work together to make learning more creative and innovative.
When instructors are encouraged to share their teaching practices and learning journeys with their colleagues, it forces them to determine what works best in their classroom. They need to think about whether it was the learning goals they set, the way they work with students, or a certain book or visual trigger that got students interested.
