Indeed, it would be hard to find anyone who would say that teacher professional development is unnecessary. Professional development for serving teachers is a statutory requirement in most states. However, most of these requirements are so loosely worded as to be almost meaningless. Pennsylvania’s Act 48 (Act of Nov. 23, 1999, P.L. 529, No. 48) requires teachers to complete 180 hours of professional development that relates to an educator’s certificate type or area of assignment every five years. Note that there is no requirement for teachers to improve their practice or even to learn anything. The only requirement is to endure 180 hours of professional development.
Many states justify these requirements with the need for teachers to “keep up to date” with the latest developments in the field, but such a justification merely encourages teachers to chase the latest fad. One year, it’s language across the curriculum; the next year, it’s differentiated instruction. Because teachers are bombarded with innovations, none of these innovations has time to take root, so nothing really changes. And worse, not only is there little or no real improvement in what happens in classrooms, but teachers get justifiably cynical about the constant barrage of innovations to which they are subjected. The reason that teachers need professional development has nothing to do with professional updating. Teachers need professional development because the job of teaching is so difficult, so complex, that one lifetime is not enough to master it.
The fact that teaching is so complex is what makes it such a great job. At one time, André Previn was the highest-paid film-score composer in Hollywood, and yet one day, he quit. People asked him why he had given up this amazing job, and he replied, “I wasn’t scared anymore.” Every day, he was going in to his office knowing that his job held no challenges for him. This is not something that any teacher is ever going to have to worry about.
Even the best teachers fail. Talk to these teachers, and no matter how well the lesson went, they always can think of things that didn’t go as well as they would have liked, things that they will do differently next time. But things get much, much worse when we collect the students’ notebooks and look at what they thought we said. That’s why Doug Lemov (2010) says that, for teachers, no amount of success is enough. The only teachers who think they are successful are those who have low expectations of their students. They are the sort of teachers who say, “What can you expect from these kids?” The answer is, of course, a lot more than the students are achieving with those teachers. The best teachers fail all the time because they have such high aspirations for what their students can achieve (generally much higher aspirations than the students themselves have).
People often contact me and ask whether I have any research instruments for evaluating the quality of teaching. I don’t, because working out which teachers are good and which teachers are not so good is of far less interest to me than helping teachers improve. No teacher is so good—or so bad—that he or she cannot improve. That is why we need professional development.
Although there is widespread agreement that professional development is valuable, there is much less agreement about what form it should take, and there is little research about what should be the focus of teacher professional development. However, there does seem to be a consensus that one-shot deals—sessions ranging from one to five days held during the summer—are of limited effectiveness, even though they are the most common model (Muijs, Kyriakides, van der Werf, Creemers, Timperley, & Earl, 2014). The following sections highlight some of the more popular areas of focus for professional development.
Learning Styles
Many teachers are attracted to developments such as theories pertaining to students’ learning styles. The idea that each learner has a particular preferred style of learning is attractive—intuitive even. It marries up with every teacher’s experience that students really are different; it just feels right. However, there is little agreement among psychologists about what learning styles are, let alone how to define them. One review of the research in this area finds seventy-one different models of learning styles (Coffield, Moseley, Hall, & Ecclestone, 2004). Indeed, it is difficult not to get the impression that the proposers of new classifications of learning styles have followed Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s advice: “If you want to get ahead, get a theory” (Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1974/1975). Some of the definitions, and the questionnaires used to measure them, are so flaky that one may classify an individual as having one learning style one day and a different one the next (Boyle, 1995). Others do seem to tap into deep and stable differences between individuals in how they think and learn, but there does not appear to be any way to use this in teaching.
Although many studies have tried to show that taking students’ individual learning styles into account improves learning, evidence remains elusive (Coffield et al., 2004). The Association for Psychological Science asked a blue-ribbon panel of America’s leading psychologists of education to review the available research evidence to see whether there was evidence that teaching students in their preferred learning style would have an impact on student achievement. They realized that any experiment that showed the benefit of teaching students in their preferred learning style (what they called the meshing hypothesis) would have to satisfy three conditions.
1. Following some assessment of their presumed learning style, teachers would divide learners into two or more groups (for example, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners).
2. Teachers would randomly allocate learners within each of the learning-style groups to at least two different methods of instruction (for example, visual- and auditory-based approaches).
3. Teachers would give all students in the study the same final test of achievement.
In such an experiment, the meshing hypothesis would be supported if the results showed that the learning method that optimized test performance of one learning-style group (for example, visual learners) was different from the learning method that optimized the test performance of a second learning-style group (for example, auditory learners). In their review, Harold Pashler and colleagues found only one study that gave even partial support to the meshing hypothesis, and two that clearly contradicted it. Their conclusion was stark: “If classification of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated” (Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, & Bjork, 2008, p. 117).
Now, of course, the fact that there is currently no evidence in favor of the meshing hypothesis does not mean that such evidence will not be forthcoming in the future; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, it could be that the whole idea of learning styles research is misguided because its basic assumption—that the purpose of instructional design is to make learning easy—may just be incorrect.
Since the pioneering work of Hugh Carlton Blodgett in the 1920s, psychologists have found that performance on a learning task is a poor predictor of long-term retention (for a summary of this research, see Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015). More precisely, when learners do well on a learning task, they are likely to forget things more quickly than if they do badly on the learning task; good instruction creates “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994, p. 193) for the learner. As Daniel Willingham (2009) says, “memory is the residue of thought” (p. 41). By trying to match our instruction to our students’ preferred learning style, we may, in fact, be reducing learning. If students do not have to work hard to make sense of what they are learning, then they are less likely to remember it in six weeks’ time. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the research on learning styles is that teachers need to know about learning styles if only to avoid the trap of teaching in the style they believe works best for them. A review of the literature on learning styles and learning strategies (Adey, Fairbrother, Wiliam, Johnson, & Jones, 1999) concludes that:
The only feasible “solution” is that teachers should NOT try to fit their teaching to each child’s style, but rather that they should become aware of different styles (and help students also to become aware of different styles) and then encourage all students to use as wide a variety of styles