Teachers' professional learning
December 2005
Introduction
What do studies of continuing professional development (CPD) tell us about the factors which help professional growth of teachers and pupil learning?
To read a one-page summary of this RoM, go to the overview.
CPD is high on the school improvement agenda. It’s also a vital ingredient in the development of teachers’ careers, as exemplified by recent national initiatives in coaching and mentoring, and workforce remodelling etc*. Our Research of the Month in February 2004 explored the evidence from a systematic review about effective professional development for teachers – at the time national interest in CPD was growing fast.
This month, the Research of the Month team have summarised and synthesised the findings of two further systematic reviews concerned with CPD conducted by the same review group, which were published online by the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information (EPPI) and Co-ordinating centre in summer 2005 **. The General Teaching Council has supported each of the reviews. One review compared the nature and impact of individual and collaborative CPD. The other compared studies of collaborative CPD that focused only on teachers with studies that explored the effects of CPD on pupils. The aim was to explore similarities and differences between the two and how far evidence about pupils can be inferred from evidence about teachers’ responses to CPD.
Evidence from the studies included in the reviews showed the importance of teachers working together to support and sustain the development of their own and their colleagues’ practice. The vast majority of the collaborative CPD studies reviewed offered evidence of improvement in pupil learning, often accompanied by positive changes in either pupil behaviour, or their attitudes, or both.
The reviewers concluded that positive teacher, pupil and school outcomes are likely when schools and CPD leaders structure CPD so that it integrates in-school learning with specialist expertise, develops through peer support and provides teachers with opportunities to interpret externally mandated CPD collaboratively in their own contexts.
Practitioners and policy makers at a number of levels are now using the findings from the first CPD review. Knowing what works best in CPD has been influential in relation to informing the policies underpinning:
- national initiatives, such as the government’s policies and strategies for CPD, which highlight the importance of coaching and collaboration
- advisory and development work on CPD generated by the General Teaching Council for England (GTC), including the Teacher Learning Academy (see Further Reading section)
- the new National Framework for Mentoring and Coaching being disseminated by the Training and Development Agency (see Further Reading section).
The National Union of Teachers (NUT), the main sponsor of the first review, has also continued to have a keen interest in the review findings and their usefulness for teachers.
* The recently developed National Framework for Mentoring and Coaching framework document can be accessed on the Teacher Development Agency website (see Further Reading section)
** All three systematic reviews of continuing professional development can be found on the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating (EPPI) Centre website (see Further Reading section).
Because a large number of studies were included in the two reviews, in each section we’ve tried to use those examples that best illustrate the main patterns.
About the terms used:
‘Collaborative CPD’ refers to programmes where there were specific plans to encourage and enable shared learning and support between at least two teacher colleagues on a sustained basis.
‘Individually orientated CPD’ refers to programmes where there were no explicit plans for the use of collaboration as a learning strategy and/or no activities explicitly designed to support or sustain such collaboration.
Sustained CPD refers to programmes that were designed to continue for at least twelve weeks or one term. One-off, one-day or short residential courses with no planned classroom activities as follow-up and/or no plans for building systematically upon existing practice were not included. (This is not to say that these have no impact, of course).
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