Every year, schools invest a great deal of time, money, and goodwill in training teachers. Teachers attend workshops, sign attendance sheets, receive certificates, and return to their classrooms on Monday morning. Yet in far too many schools, those Monday-morning classrooms look almost the same as before.
This is not a failure of teachers. It is a failure of design. After more than eight years working in education quality assurance, teacher training, and academic auditing across Pakistan, I have come to believe that we don’t have a training problem. We have a learning problem. We have built systems that are very good at delivering professional development and much less good at producing professional growth.
This post looks honestly at how we currently approach teacher professional development (PD), what the research says works, and what schools and systems need to do differently.
How We Are Doing: An Honest Assessment
The one-off workshop still dominates
The most common form of PD remains the one-day or two-day workshop: an expert presents, teachers listen, and there is little or no follow-up. The evidence against this model is consistent. In a major review for the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences, Yoon et al. (2007) found that programs offering fewer than 14 hours of PD showed no statistically significant effect on student achievement. Programs averaging around 49 hours were associated with gains of roughly 21 percentile points. Short, disconnected sessions may raise awareness, but they rarely change practice.
Large investment, uncertain returns
Spending is not the same as impact. TNTP’s (2015) study of large U.S. school districts estimated that districts spent about $18,000 per teacher each year on development. It found no consistent evidence that any particular form of that support reliably improved teaching. Most teachers in the study also believed their PD was helping, even when their performance ratings did not improve. That gap between perceived value and actual change should concern every PD designer.
What works in research often isn’t what gets delivered at scale
This is a global problem, not only a Western one. Popova et al. (2022) examined teacher PD programs in low- and middle-income countries. They found a clear gap between the features of programs shown to work in rigorous evaluations and the features of programs governments actually run at scale. Successful programs tended to include subject-specific content, opportunities to practise lessons, and links to career incentives such as promotion or salary. Scaled-up programs often lacked these features.
The World Bank’s World Development Report 2018 reached a similar conclusion: teacher training in many systems is too theoretical, too general, and too distant from the realities of the classroom (World Bank, 2018).
In our own context
In Pakistan, cascade training remains common. A master trainer trains a group, who then train others, who then train others again. Each layer dilutes the message, and by the time it reaches the classroom teacher, a rich instructional idea has often become a checklist. PD calendars are frequently set by what is available rather than what teachers need. Success is measured by attendance, participant satisfaction forms, and certificates issued, not by changes in teaching or learning. Guskey (2000) described these reaction-level measures as the weakest form of PD evaluation, because they tell us whether teachers liked a session, not whether it changed anything.
What the Evidence Says Actually Works
The good news is that we are not guessing. Several decades of research point to a fairly stable set of design principles.
1. Focus on content and the classroom
Darling-Hammond et al. (2017) reviewed 35 methodologically rigorous studies and identified seven features of effective PD. It is content-focused, incorporates active learning, supports collaboration, uses models of effective practice, provides coaching and expert support, offers feedback and reflection, and is sustained over time. Desimone (2009) proposed a similar core framework: content focus, active learning, coherence with school goals, sufficient duration, and collective participation. Generic sessions on “21st-century skills” or “student-centred learning” rarely meet these standards unless they are anchored in the subjects and lessons teachers actually teach.
2. Coaching beats presenting
If one approach stands out in the research, it is instructional coaching. In a meta-analysis of 60 causal studies, Kraft et al. (2018) found that coaching had a pooled effect of 0.49 standard deviations on instructional practice and 0.18 standard deviations on student achievement. These are large effects by education research standards. They also found that effects were smaller in larger programs. This is an important warning: coaching works, but scaling it without protecting quality weakens it.
3. Build knowledge and embed practice
A systematic review and meta-analysis commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation identified 14 “mechanisms” that make PD effective. They grouped these under four purposes: building knowledge, motivating teachers, developing teaching techniques, and embedding practice (Sims et al., 2021). Programs that combined mechanisms across all four purposes were more effective than those that addressed only one or two. Most traditional workshops do reasonably well at building knowledge. They do poorly at developing techniques through rehearsal and feedback, and poorly at embedding new habits over time.
4. Help teachers understand the “why,” not just the “what”
Kennedy (2016) found that programs which simply prescribe practices tend to be less durable than programs that help teachers understand the purposes behind those practices and adapt them strategically. Teachers are professionals making hundreds of decisions a day. PD that treats them as implementers of scripts misses how teaching actually works.
5. Beliefs change after results, not before
Guskey (2002) made a point that is still underappreciated: teachers’ attitudes and beliefs usually change after they see improvement in their students’ learning, not before. Many PD programs spend their energy trying to “convince” teachers first. A more effective sequence is to help teachers try a well-supported practice, see its effect on students, and let belief follow evidence.
6. Anchor learning in student outcomes
Timperley et al. (2007) synthesised a large body of evidence and found that effective professional learning is closely tied to what students need to learn. It works through cycles of inquiry in which teachers identify student needs, learn new approaches, try them, and examine the impact. Time matters, but time alone is not sufficient. What happens in that time matters more.
How We Actually Need to Do It
Drawing the research together with lessons from the field, here is what I believe schools, networks, and education NGOs need to change.
Start with diagnosis, not a calendar. PD should begin with evidence about what students are struggling to learn and where teaching practice needs to grow. Classroom observations, assessment data, and teacher self-reflection should shape the agenda. A fixed annual menu should not.
Replace events with cycles. Instead of isolated workshops, design PD as a continuous cycle: learn a practice, see it modelled, rehearse it, apply it in class, receive feedback, and reflect. Repeat. A shorter launch session followed by weeks of structured follow-up is worth far more than a longer workshop with nothing after it.
Invest in school-based coaching. Every school needs someone, whether a head teacher, subject lead, or trained peer coach, whose role includes observing lessons and giving specific, supportive feedback. Coaches need training and protected time of their own. Without these, coaching becomes inspection under a different name.
Make it subject-specific. A mathematics teacher and a language teacher face different instructional challenges. PD should work with real lessons, real curriculum content, and real student work from teachers’ own classrooms.
Build professional communities. Structured collaboration, such as lesson study, peer observation, and professional learning communities, turns individual learning into collective capacity. It also makes improvement more resilient when individual teachers move on.
Link PD to career pathways. Popova et al. (2022) found that programs linked to career incentives tended to show stronger results. Certification levels, promotion criteria, and recognition should reward demonstrated growth in practice, not hours of attendance.
Evaluate what matters. Move beyond satisfaction forms. Use Guskey’s (2000) levels of evaluation as a guide: participant reactions, participant learning, organisational support, use of new knowledge and skills, and student learning outcomes. If we don’t measure classroom change, we will keep mistaking activity for impact.
Protect quality when scaling. When a pilot succeeds, the temptation is to expand it quickly through cascade training. Kraft et al. (2018) showed that effects shrink as programs grow. Scaling well means investing in the quality of trainers and coaches at every layer, and monitoring fidelity as carefully as reach.
A Closing Thought
Teacher professional development is one of the most powerful levers we have for improving children’s learning, but only when it is designed as learning rather than delivered as an event. The question for every school leader and PD designer is not “How many teachers did we train this year?” It is “What is different in our classrooms because of it, and how do we know?”
When we can answer that second question with evidence, we will have moved from training teachers to truly developing them.
References
- Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective teacher professional development. Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/122.311
- Desimone, L. M. (2009). Improving impact studies of teachers’ professional development: Toward better conceptualizations and measures. Educational Researcher, 38(3), 181–199. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X08331140
- Guskey, T. R. (2000). Evaluating professional development. Corwin Press.
- Guskey, T. R. (2002). Professional development and teacher change. Teachers and Teaching, 8(3), 381–391. https://doi.org/10.1080/135406002100000512
- Kennedy, M. M. (2016). How does professional development improve teaching? Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 945–980. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654315626800
- Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D., & Hogan, D. (2018). The effect of teacher coaching on instruction and achievement: A meta-analysis of the causal evidence. Review of Educational Research, 88(4), 547–588. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654318759268
- Popova, A., Evans, D. K., Breeding, M. E., & Arancibia, V. (2022). Teacher professional development around the world: The gap between evidence and practice. The World Bank Research Observer, 37(1), 107–136. https://doi.org/10.1093/wbro/lkab006
- Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Van Herwegen, J., & Anders, J. (2021). What are the characteristics of effective teacher professional development? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Education Endowment Foundation.
- Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H., & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher professional learning and development: Best evidence synthesis iteration. New Zealand Ministry of Education.
- TNTP. (2015). The mirage: Confronting the hard truth about our quest for teacher development.
- World Bank. (2018). World development report 2018: Learning to realize education’s promise. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1096-1
- Yoon, K. S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W.-Y., Scarloss, B., & Shapley, K. L. (2007). Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement (Issues & Answers Report, REL 2007–No. 033). U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest.