Why Is Teacher Professional Development So Bad?

It’s the week before school starts. You haven’t had a chance to set up your classroom (or you are moving rooms or you are trying to find where all of your supplies went over the summer). You haven’t had a chance to read your students’ IEPs yet or make cubbies for students or revamp last year’s lessons. But that will have to wait because it’s time for professional development. 

It’s a Friday afternoon. The students have left early, and everyone in the school is exhausted. Students are behind academically, and our fellow teachers are consoling each other about students who cussed them out or told them to “suck my dick.” But the weekend hasn’t started yet. It’s time for professional development..

Mention professional development, or PD, to a teacher, and you’ll inevitably get one of the deepest eyerolls you have ever seen. 9 out of every 10 teachers in the US attend some kind of PD every year to the tune of $2.5 billion per year( which former education secretary Arne Duncan said was largely useless because of its failed results). In-school teacher professional development, however,  is despised and dreaded among teachers across the US. This isn’t to say that all PD is bad—I have attended many wonderful PDs outside of school that is in-depth, rigorous, and have truly transformed my classroom practice. But the kind of PD I am referring to here—where teachers at many schools sit through trainings on a Friday afternoon or in the weeks before school starts—is bad. Really bad.

Ostensibly, in-house PD is designed to increase teachers’ skills. In practice, it is frequently insubstantial and unstructured. In the best cases, teachers are made to learn things that are unhelpful, irrelevant, and oftentimes vacuous in a highly structured environment, frequently taught by administrators who haven’t taught in a classroom in years. Other times, though, teachers just spend PD time looking over student data, speculating about its causes and trying to divine ways to improve test scores, with little actual instructional support or remediation for teachers.

So why are in-school PDs so bad? 

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The Rise of Professional Learning Communities

The terribleness of teacher professional development is not new. Like many aspects of American education reform, a lot of how professional development operates in American schools traces its roots back to the 1983 Reagan Administration report A Nation At Risk. A Nation At Risk excoriated American schools, likening the woeful state of American education to a national security risk. In the aftermath of the report, successful schools across the country were studied to see if any commonalities existed; one of the ideas stemming from this research was the Professional Learning Community. 

The idea of PLCs stems from multiple disciplines. In the 1975, sociologist Dan C. Lortie published the book Schoolteacher, illuminating the extent to which teachers worked in isolation. This was coupled with an increased concern among private sector employers about how to keep white collar office employees engaged and to create better business outcomes. In his 1990 book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge wrote: 

An organization that fails to extend a sense of trust to creatively solve local problems in a manner consistent with the purpose and values of the organization, typically mandates solutions instead that are poorly suited to the real problem at hand. 

Thus sprung the idea of the professional learning community. While not every school calls their in-house professional development a “professional learning community,” much school-based PD has its roots in the PLC model. 

According to Mike Schmoker (2005), Senge’s ideas of workforce improvement through reflective decisionmaking spread rapidly from the private sector to education. Teachers needed to be able to collaborate with their peers to make decisions that solve issues in their school. By the end of the 90s, fervor for PLCs had grown to a “major rally cry” (DuFour and Eaker 1998). According to Dr. Kimberly Archer, PLCs:

(a) collaboratively developed and shared mission, vision, values, and goals of the school and division; (b) collaborative teams that work interdependently to achieve common goals; and (c) teams using data to drive the role of instructional and school improvement to see targeted results.

PLCs Conflict With “Accountability” Reform

So what happened to PLCs? How did they transform from a sincere effort to have teachers collaborate and solve school problems to feeling mostly irrelevant and a waste of time?

PLCs came of age during the era of accountability and  education data in the 90s and 2000s–which took the focus away from improving the qualitative experience of students and teachers and instead focused on creating results that could be quantitatively measured. According to Heather Hill (2020):

With the birth of large-scale state assessments and widening data availability in the 1990s, school leaders and teachers could access information on student performance that was common across schools and classrooms. Many schools also instituted standardized “interim” assessments, claiming that this periodic, low-stakes testing could help teachers identify difficult content and struggling students before the state assessment, giving both teachers and students a chance to catch up.

As I have written in previous posts, though, education data oftentimes is not very meaningful, and the people reviewing the data usually aren’t trained in analyzing data. A 2016 Harvard study found that analyzing education data in professional development was largely ineffective, precisely because it didn’t lead to actual changes in practices. Despite the finding, however, 94% of teachers said they had analyzed student performance during PD time–with 15% saying they spent over 40 hours analyzing data in a year. This is especially the case in Title 1 schools, which are under frequent pressure to justify their existence with data-backed results. 

While PLCs require that teachers be able to collaborate with others and have decision-making authority, with the rise of the accountability movement of the 90s and 2000s, principals were under increased pressure to raise test scores and to make sure their teachers were teaching to the standards. The devolution policy of PLCs came into direct conflict with administrative accountability, and ultimately administrative accountability won.

Have you ever sat in a data-driven PD where you looked at data but…it was clear your principal had a message they wanted you to glean? Much “inquiry” in schools is actually just top-down directives (from policymakers and district leaders) with the veneer of democracy. Administrators want you to inquire but only to the extent that it leads you to the outcome or the teaching practice that they desire. And this makes sense, given the policy pressures administrators face from district leaders and policymakers, who are intent to push some new fad or to raise test scores. The problem is, this isn’t real inquiry–this is manipulation. And it leads to frustration among teachers, who recognize the insincerity of much “inquiry” and who would relish the chance to actually engage in systemic improvement and research. Indeed, less than 25% of teachers in the US feel like they have influence in school decision-making. 

If  a school was actually interested in inquiry, they might start where a lot of academic research starts: a sincere question with a literature review. They might look at competing theories of how to address a problem and debate about which one is the best, democratically decide on which method to implement, and receive training to implement it. They could then look at student data before and after and seriously ask if the intervention worked–and accept that it may not have worked. 

Instead, school leaders frequently have the intervention they desire already in mind and merely seek to find data that shows the intervention was, in fact, effective; their queries are insincere.. They have the answer they want and merely want you to come to the same conclusion they already came to. 

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The managerial model of education

Advocates for PLCs tried to inject a democratic education idea into a system that was still very managerial. Under the managerial model, students’ and teachers time is tightly controlled, and outcomes are quantitatively measured for compliance. PLCs, for one, require that teachers be given adequate time to reflect on their practice, collaborate with other teachers, and learn new skills. To make PLCs work, school leaders need to either create the structural reforms that would allow for these to be successful or throw out the notion of PLCs altogether and instead own what they are doing: top-down directives. Give teachers back their time or use their time well, but don’t waste their time. 

Teachers in the US spend 80% of their time teaching students, as opposed to 60% in many of the top-performing countries; the time not spent teaching is used for preparing and improving (or if you’re a teacher in the US, recovering from having just taught 4 hours in a row). In Singapore, for instance, the government pays for teachers to attend 100 hours of professional development–in addition to 20 hours per week that they have to collaborate with their peers. 

Because of the lack of time that teachers in the US have for professional learning, what PLCs are in the US is a parody of what they were intended to be. Teachers typically aren’t trained in new content or new methods–or the training is oftentimes very abbreviated to fit within time constraints (e.g. reading a paragraph or a page or two). Teachers are then asked what they think ought to be done based on data (again, that is probably not being used correctly). Because of time constraints, schools are too focused on doing something that the learning doesn’t actually happen. Rather than learning new strategies for reading, we sit at a table and speculate what interventions we ought to do to improve reading…without learning about any interventions! A Stanford study found that while rigorous training of up to 50 hours can raise student test scores as much as 21 percentage points, the majority of teachers in the US receive no more than 16 hours of training in a year. Moreover, much of the training teachers do receive is not rigorous or substantive. The most successful of PDs oftentimes focus on learning specific teaching strategies–going through curriculum materials as if they were students themselves. But this kind of work takes time and energy, both of which are in short supply in the US. 

Despite PLCs existence for 30 years, they have still not produced the kind of professional development revolution they claimed. Like every other education fad before and after it, PLCs have not been the panacea many hoped they would be; in-school professional development is still very bad. The idea of a PLC is not inherently bad, but they cannot function without actually democratizing decision-making in schools and without giving teachers more time–both of which conflict with the current managerial model of education. As Peter Senge wrote, PLCs require actually trusting your employees–not seeking to manage them.