Meaningful Teacher Professional Development: A Learning Sciences Perspective

Professional development (PD) researchers have reached some consensus about quality PD, yielding lists of features correlated to positive outcomes. Yet examples of PD abound that meet these criteria without the desirable outcomes, suggesting that conceptual issues persist––including the underconceptualization of teacher learning. Taking a learning sciences perspective, the authors ask what makes PD meaningful for teachers’ learning. They use a conceptual change perspective on teacher learning, offering five design principles for meaningful PD. Meaningful PD requires (a) facilitators with expertise in both accomplished teaching and andragogy; (b) attention to teachers’ learning goals, existing conceptions of core ideas, and teaching identities; (c) fostering a supportive institutional climate, with (d) opportunities for nonevaluative formative feedback that allows for experimenting, improvising, and troubleshooting; and (e) providing a community of like-minded colleagues. These principles offer empirically and theoretically based guidance for PD designs that engage teachers and sustain instructional change.

Keywords: teacher learning; professional development; learning sciences; design principles