Can Professional Development Improve Teaching and Learning?
Professional development can, unequivocally, enhance teaching and learning. Many carefully designed studies over the past twentyfive years have shown that teacher learning can lead to improved student outcomes. Several representative studies offer insights about what the research, as a whole, indicates about effective professional development. Tom Good, Douglas Grouws, and Howard Ebmeier were among the first to study how teachers’ professional development relates to student achievement.24 As reported in 1983, the authors designed an intervention aimed at fostering “active mathematics teaching,” including daily review, extended development of new mathematical content, and student practice with new content. They assigned teachers randomly to either a treatment or a control group. Teachers in the treatment group were given a detailed teaching manual and introduced to the program during two ninety-minute workshops. After two months, students of treatment teachers had gained a full standard
