Professional development has the potential to help millions of hardworking teachers cultivate their instructional practice to improve student outcomes. Yet in many districts, this resource fails to produce positive changes in the classroom, despite substantial investments of money and time.

ExcelinEd’s new policy brief, Transforming Professional Learning: Actions for States to Help Teachers Continuously Improve Their Instructional Practices, can help.

Transforming Professional Learning examines what teachers need to succeed and offers five steps states can consider taking to help districts create a professional learning system that empowers teachers to develop their instructional practice and improve learning for students.

How Can States Transform Professional Learning?

Teachers need support to learn new practices and grow professionally. However, the professional learning development teachers receive in many school districts is severely deficient. States can play an important role in this crucial issue, yet state policymakers may feel they have few tools to address a problem that seems inherently local in nature.

States that take the following five steps can help transform professional learning to benefit teachers and students:

1. Identify research-based instructional practices and materials.

There are thousands of instructional practices and materials touted by various groups, and many of them are not research-based. States can create a list of research-based instructional practices and materials and incentivize districts to use them.

2. Support personalized and competency-based learning structures.

After identifying the instructional practices that have the strongest research base, states can subsidize a system of micro-credentials to facilitate teacher mastery of these practices. Then states can replace continuing education requirements with a competency-based system that allows teachers to focus on developing research-based instructional practices to help them reach their professional learning goals.

3. Fund intensive coaching, provide time for collaboration and build social capital.

States can also set clear expectations that every teacher receives intensive coaching and has significant time for collaboration. Since coaching and teacher collaboration could be expensive for districts, states can provide designated funding to help districts cover the costs.

4. Create opportunities for advancement and recognition.

In addition to providing dedicated funding for instructional coaching, states can support higher salaries for teacher leaders. States can also encourage districts to recognize competency-based learning as being equivalent to master’s degrees in their salary schedules. (This reduces the additional cost to districts of creating incentives for teacher leaders, instructional coaches and teachers who develop their practices.)

5. Build district capacity, coherency and aligned resources.

Given the many capacities districts need to develop and implement a coherent professional learning system, states can identify and negotiate statewide contracts with high-quality, capacity-building providers. This process can make these services cheaper for districts and faster to secure. Many states also have regional entities that support multi-district efforts. States can strengthen these entities and provide them with resources and a mandate to help districts in designing and implementing a professional learning system.