Professional Development to Support Student Achievement

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Slide 11 of 11

Summary

Research says that professional development has to be directly connected to daily work with students, related to content areas, organized around real problems of practice instead of abstractions, continuous and ongoing, and able to provide teachers with access to outside resources and expertise.

Professional development should take place within a professional community, a team or network, or both. Changing practice is a difficult and long-term proposition that can't be handled by going off to a workshop.

Teachers have to practice change and continually work with others on debugging the problems they encounter.

Linda Darling-Hammond
The Harvard Education Letter, 1997