The Impact of Evidence-Based Professional Learning
Written by Sarah Johnson
Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash
When I was a high school teacher, I taught 150 students spread across 5 to 6 class periods a day. I had less than one hour of planning time per day, and I hardly had any time at all to meet with or learn from colleagues.
The development opportunities from my school were hastily thrown together and rarely relevant to what I was teaching in my classroom. My students bore the brunt of this systemic failure.
I did the best I could, but there are many things I could have done better, like using evidence to ensure all of my students learned to read and write on grade level. I didn’t learn about reading science-based instruction, an incredibly well-established research base, until I left the classroom.
I share this because unfortunately what I describe above is still the norm in education. Oftentimes, teachers don’t feel prepared when they start teaching, and then they never get an opportunity to learn what research shows advances teaching and learning.
Treat Teachers Like Professionals
There is so much talk right now about reimagining education and accelerating student learning. And I am honestly exasperated from pointing out that: none of this will happen unless we treat teachers like professionals, and give them real opportunities to learn and grow. Teacher learning and development is an essential part of ANY pandemic recovery theory of action.
This is why I am also excited to share that research on Teaching Lab’s professional learning shows statistically significant impact, especially on teacher content knowledge and equitable mindsets. We partnered with New Mexico educators and an external evaluator, Dr. David Blazar, to achieve this impact.
We pride ourselves on only measuring content knowledge and mindsets that have already shown through research to be predictive of impact on student outcomes.
Standardized differences ranged from 0.4 to 1 standard deviation, which are similar to or larger than differences between novice versus veteran teachers. This means that over a very short professional learning engagement, teachers advanced as much as a novice teacher would over the course of accumulating years of teaching experience.
Reimagining Education
How did we do this? Teachers engaged in PL to learn how to:
Accelerate student learning aligned to core mathematical practices and standards;
Strengthen students’ conceptual understanding to solve new problems in the future;
Affirm students’ diverse (mathematical) identities and leverage student existing knowledge to learn new knowledge;
Use high-quality curricular materials (i.e., EngageNY, Illustrative Math) to facilitate high-quality instruction.
If all of our math professional learning this upcoming year centered these four things, our teachers and students would be better off.
Reach out to learn more about our evidence-based model.
