Category: Teacher Support

For teachers about their own professional survival: mentorship, avoiding isolation, and classroom systems that hold up under real conditions.

Teacher Professional Development Workshops: When They Work and When They Are Theater

By Clay Shumate

Teacher professional development workshops are single sessions, usually one to six hours, in which a presenter introduces a practice to a group. A workshop can do three things well: introduce an idea, demonstrate what it looks like, and give a staff shared language for it. It cannot install the practice. That requires follow-up, and most workshops are never funded for any.

I want to be careful here, because “workshops do not work” has become the kind of thing people say to sound informed, and it is not quite true. The format has a job. The problem is that the job it can do is small, and we keep asking it to do a much bigger one. This piece is about the single session specifically — what the delivery format can and cannot carry, and how to tell the difference before you sit down.

Key Takeaways

A workshop is an introduction, not an installation. Explaining a practice and getting it running in a classroom are different jobs, and only the first fits in one session.
Under roughly 14 total hours, the studies stop finding student effects. In the federal review that applied What Works Clearinghouse standards, the three programs with 5 to 14 hours showed no statistically significant achievement effects.
Follow-up is the whole variable. The one delivery model with strong causal evidence — coaching — is essentially “someone comes back,” and it produced a 0.49 SD effect on instruction across 60 studies.
Design features are not the same as effectiveness. Reviews that catalog the features of good PD studied programs that already worked, which is a different claim than the one most workshop agendas imply.
Teacher workshops are not theater because teachers are cynical. They are theater when nobody is accountable for what happens after, and the people booking them usually know this.
A good one-off tells you the truth about itself. “Today is awareness, implementation starts in October with these three supports” is a defensible sentence. “You have now been trained” is not.

What is a professional development workshop supposed to do?

Change what a teacher knows and believes, so that a later change in practice becomes possible. That is the honest job description. A session can put a practice in front of forty people who had never considered it, show it working, name its parts, and answer the first round of objections. That is real value and it is not nothing.

The trouble starts when a workshop gets described as training. Training implies that someone can now do the thing. After one session, almost nobody can. They can describe it. The gap between describing a practice and executing it at 9:15 on a Tuesday with twenty-eight teenagers is the entire problem of professional learning, and the single-session format does not touch it.

So when you look at an agenda, read it for what it is claiming. A session that promises awareness and delivers awareness has done its job. A session that promises implementation in ninety minutes has made a claim nobody can keep.

What can a workshop genuinely accomplish?

Four things, all of them upstream of practice. I would rate them in this order.

Existence. Teachers cannot adopt a practice they have never heard of. A workshop is a cheap, fast way to put something on the table.
Demonstration. Watching a practice done well — live, modeled, or on video with real students — resolves questions no handout answers. The Learning Policy Institute’s review of 35 rigorous studies found modeling of effective practice among the features common to programs that worked (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017).
Shared vocabulary. When a whole department leaves with the same words for the same move, the hallway conversations afterward get cheaper. This is a genuinely underrated function.
Content knowledge. A workshop can teach subject matter. A randomized federal study delivered 80 hours of summer mathematics content work and measurably improved teachers’ mathematical knowledge and the quality of their in-class explanations — so sessions can move knowledge, and reliably (Garet et al., NCEE 2016–4010).

Note the word “upstream” in all four. Existence, demonstration, vocabulary and knowledge are preconditions. None of them is a changed lesson.

Four cards distinguishing what a one-off teacher workshop can accomplish from what it cannot do without follow-up. — The format has a real job; the trouble starts when it is asked to do the installation too.

What can a workshop not do on its own?

It cannot get a new practice past the second attempt, and the second attempt is where practices die. The first try of anything new is usually rough. A teacher who has nobody to debrief that rough first try with reads the roughness as evidence the practice does not work in their room, and goes back to what was working well enough. That is a rational response to no feedback.

The same federal study that raised teacher knowledge with 93 total hours of PD found no positive impact on student achievement. The teachers knew more math and gave better explanations, and the students’ scores did not move within the study window. Worth naming the population: over 200 fourth-grade mathematics teachers across six districts in five states. This site is about grades 6–12 and I am not going to pretend a fourth-grade math result transfers directly. The structural lesson does transfer: knowledge gain is not the finish line, and a workshop that delivers knowledge has delivered a middle step.

A workshop also cannot solve the problems that are actually blocking the practice — no planning time, a grading load that eats the weekend, a schedule with no common prep, a class where the basic routines are not yet reliable. If the obstacle is time or structure, more explanation does not help.

Why do teacher workshops keep getting booked anyway?

Because the workshop is the only PD format that scales to an entire staff on one calendar day at a known price. I think it is worth being generous about this rather than cynical. A principal with one professional day and a fixed budget can reach every adult in the building for the cost of a presenter and a cafeteria. Nothing else does that.

There is also an accountability logic. When a district needs to demonstrate that staff were informed of something — a policy change, a legal requirement, a new platform — a session with a sign-in sheet produces a record. For genuinely informational content, that is the right tool. Nobody needs coaching cycles to learn where the new incident report lives.

The failure is not booking the workshop. The failure is booking a workshop for an instructional change and then reporting attendance as if it were implementation. TNTP’s widely cited 2015 report estimated teachers spent the equivalent of about 19 school days a year on development activities in the districts it studied, at roughly $18,000 per teacher, without finding a pattern that separated the teachers who improved (TNTP, 2015). That report has serious methodological critics and I would not lean on its conclusions, but the time estimate is the part worth sitting with. Nineteen days is a lot of days.

How many hours before a workshop shows up in student learning?

The best available threshold is about 14 total contact hours, and below it the evidence goes quiet. The federal regional lab review by Yoon and colleagues screened more than 1,300 studies and found nine that met What Works Clearinghouse evidence standards. Programs above 14 hours showed positive, significant effects on student achievement; the three programs with the least time — 5 to 14 hours total — showed no statistically significant effects (Yoon et al., REL 2007–033).

Be careful with that number. Nine studies is a thin base, the review is from 2007, and all nine ran in elementary grades. It is not a law. What it is good for is arithmetic. A single three-hour session is a fifth of the way to the floor. Three such sessions across a year, with nothing between them, still does not clear it. If your professional learning plan for a priority consists of two half-days, you now have a defensible reason to say the plan is under-resourced rather than the teachers under-committed.

And hours alone are plainly insufficient — the 93-hour study above had the hours and no student effect. Duration is a floor, not an engine.

Five-row checklist of elements that distinguish a workshop likely to change practice from one that will not. — Five of the ten checklist items from the article; six or more unchecked means plan for awareness only.

What makes the difference between a workshop that transfers and one that does not?

Follow-up, and specifically follow-up in which somebody sees the teacher teach. This is the closest thing to a clean finding in the whole literature. Kraft, Blazar and Hogan’s meta-analysis of 60 causal studies of teacher coaching found a pooled effect of 0.49 standard deviations on instructional practice and 0.18 on student achievement (Kraft, Blazar & Hogan, 2018). An effect of 0.49 on instruction is large for education research.

Read what coaching actually consists of and it is unglamorous: someone watches a real lesson, talks about that specific lesson, and comes back. The workshop supplies the idea; the return visit supplies the installation.

The same paper carries the caution that matters for a school planning this. Effects from effectiveness trials of larger programs were only a fraction of the effects in efficacy trials of smaller programs. A coaching model with one coach for sixty teachers is not the intervention the meta-analysis measured. Ratio and protected time are the program.

Mary Kennedy’s review of 28 rigorous studies points the same direction from another angle: sorting programs by their theory of action rather than their design features, she found many popular design features were not associated with effectiveness, while the pedagogy used to help teachers enact the practice varied sharply in impact (Kennedy, 2016). In plain terms: what the session does to help you do it matters more than how the session is shaped.

Does choice matter, or is that just a morale concern?

It is both, and the research does not settle it. I will separate what I can support from what I believe. What I can support: the feature lists that mention active learning and relevance are correlational, and Sims and Fletcher-Wood argued in a critical review that those lists rest on inappropriate inclusion criteria and cannot bear the weight placed on them (Sims & Fletcher-Wood, 2021). So I cannot tell you that choice causes transfer.

What I believe, as a professional judgment: a teacher who chose the session arrives having already decided the problem is worth solving, which is most of the work of adoption. A twenty-year veteran and a first-year teacher sitting through the identical required session on questioning technique are not in the same room. Required compliance content should be required. Instructional learning does not have to be uniform, and departments that offer two or three strands instead of one usually do not pay much for it.

A checklist for evaluating teacher professional development workshops

Run the session against these ten items; six or more unchecked means you are looking at an awareness event, and should plan accordingly. This works equally well as a design tool if you are the one building it.

Element	What to look for
Stated purpose	The agenda says whether this is awareness, knowledge-building, or implementation — and does not confuse them
Total hours	The session is part of a sequence with enough combined time to clear roughly 14 hours
Return visit	A named person and a scheduled date for someone to see the practice attempted
Modeling	The practice is demonstrated with students in a comparable grade band and subject, not described
Rehearsal	Participants actually try the move during the session, on a real lesson they teach next week
Artifact out the door	Everyone leaves with something usable: a planned opening, a rewritten prompt, a scored exemplar
Something removed	A named task comes off the plate to make room, rather than the new practice being purely additive
Choice	More than one strand, or a path for people who already do this well
Success evidence	A specified observable change or student-work artifact that would indicate it worked
Honest follow-up plan	If there is no follow-up, the organizers say so out loud instead of calling it training

I would add one informal test. Ask whoever is running it: “What are you going to look at in six weeks to know whether this landed?” A good answer exists in about one case in five, and the answer tells you almost everything about how the session was planned.

Five-row sequence showing three short workshop sessions wrapped around two paired classroom visits across five weeks. — Under five hours of seat time, built backward from the second classroom attempt.

How should a department lead design a series that is worth the time?

Build backward from the second attempt. Most workshop planning starts with content and a date. Start instead with the question of who will be in whose room in week three, and build the session to serve that visit.

A sequence that fits an ordinary school calendar, roughly:

Session one, 90 minutes. One narrow practice. Modeled, not described. Everyone leaves having planned where it goes in a specific lesson next week.
Week two, protected 20 minutes. Paired teachers trade a short visit or a recording of one class. No form, no rating. One question: what happened at the moment you tried it?
Session two, 60 minutes. Bring student work. Troubleshoot the three failures that actually came up, which will not be the three you predicted.
Week five, second visit. Same pairs. The second attempt is the one that decides whether this becomes a habit.
Session three, 45 minutes. Decide together what the department keeps, what it drops, and what it will not pretend to be doing.

That is under five hours of seat time and it will outperform a full day, because the seat time is wrapped around two real classroom attempts. The expensive part is not the sessions. It is the twenty protected minutes in weeks two and five, which is a scheduling fight somebody has to be willing to have.

Pick the narrow practice carefully. A single move with a visible student behavior attached works best — something like a specific way of checking what students actually understood rather than a broad commitment to engagement.

What does an honest one-off look like?

One that names itself accurately and gives people something they can use tomorrow without any further support. Not every session needs a coaching cycle behind it. Some content genuinely is informational, and some practices are small enough to adopt from a single demonstration.

An honest one-off: announces that it is awareness or a tool handoff, runs ninety minutes rather than a day, ends with a concrete artifact in hand, and does not appear in anyone’s evaluation as evidence of training. If a presenter says “this is one idea, here is the one-page version, and nobody is going to check whether you used it” — that is an honest session, and teachers respond to that honesty.

The dishonest version is the day-long session on an instructional change, followed by nothing, followed in spring by an observation rubric that references it. That sequence teaches staff that professional learning is a compliance performance, and it is hard to un-teach. It also corrodes the shared belief that a staff can actually move students together, which is its own thread worth reading about.

How should a teacher handle a workshop they did not choose?

Decide in the first twenty minutes what the session can give you, take that, and stop grading it against what it was never going to do. This is not resignation. It is calibration, and it protects the energy you need for the class you teach the next morning.

Concretely: look for one usable thing — a phrasing, a template, one example you can steal. Ask the two operational questions out loud, because they are polite and they surface the truth: how many sessions is this, and is anyone coming by to see us try it? Write down the one thing you will actually attempt, and when. If the answer to both questions is nothing, you have learned that this is awareness, and you can give it awareness-level attention without guilt.

And then do the part the workshop cannot do for you. A short structured reflection after your own first attempt is the cheapest available substitute for a coach. The evidence base for self-reflection is much weaker than for coaching, and I will not oversell it — but it does not require anyone else’s budget or calendar.

What to do next with teacher professional development workshops

Keep the format, shrink its claims, and spend the saved money on the return visit. That is the recommendation, and it follows directly from the evidence rather than from anybody’s preference about meetings.

If you are a teacher: run the checklist, take the one usable thing, and ask the two questions. If you lead a department: book the follow-up before you book the session, and if the calendar cannot hold the follow-up, run a ninety-minute honest one-off instead of a day you cannot support. If you are a principal: stop letting attendance count as implementation in your own reporting, even internally, because that is the habit that makes every other problem invisible.

For the broader question of which professional learning models have real evidence behind them, I laid that out in the wider look at what actually changes teaching. And for why teachers should be treated as people capable of judging these offers in the first place, see the case for professional judgment over scripts.

Sources

Yoon, K. S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W.-Y., Scarloss, B., & Shapley, K. L., Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement, REL Southwest, REL 2007–No. 033, October 2007. Source for the roughly 14-hour contact threshold, the nine studies that met What Works Clearinghouse standards out of more than 1,300 screened, and the finding that programs of 5 to 14 hours showed no statistically significant achievement effects. Caveat: all nine qualifying studies were conducted in elementary grades, so the threshold is an orientation for grades 6–12 rather than a finding about them. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED498548.pdf
Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D., & Hogan, D., “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence,” Review of Educational Research, 2018. Source for the pooled coaching effects of 0.49 SD on instruction and 0.18 SD on achievement across 60 causal studies, and for the finding that larger programs produced only a fraction of smaller programs’ effects. Caveat: coaching programs in the pool differ widely in design, dosage and grade level. https://annenberg.brown.edu/publications/effect-teacher-coaching-instruction-and-achievement-meta-analysis-causal-evidence
Garet, M. S., et al., Focusing on Mathematical Knowledge: The Impact of Content-Intensive Teacher Professional Development, NCEE 2016–4010, September 2016. Source for the randomized study in which 80 hours of summer content workshop plus 13 hours of meetings and coaching raised teacher knowledge and explanation quality but produced no positive impact on student achievement. Caveat: the population was over 200 fourth-grade mathematics teachers, not secondary teachers. https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/resource-library/report/evaluation-report/focusing-mathematical-knowledge-impact-content-intensive-teacher-professional-development
Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M., Effective Teacher Professional Development, Learning Policy Institute, June 2017. Source for the seven common features of effective programs, including modeling of practice and sustained duration, drawn from 35 rigorous studies. Caveat: the authors state they cannot draw conclusions about individual components and could not examine PD that produced no positive results. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Effective_Teacher_Professional_Development_REPORT.pdf
Kennedy, M. M., “How Does Professional Development Improve Teaching?” Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 945–980, 2016. Source for the finding across 28 rigorous studies that many popular design features are not associated with effectiveness while the pedagogy supporting enactment varies sharply in impact. Caveat: the theory-of-action classification is the author’s own framework. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654315626800
Sims, S., & Fletcher-Wood, H., “Identifying the characteristics of effective teacher professional development: a critical review,” School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 32(1), 47–63, 2021. Source for the argument that influential feature lists rest on inappropriate inclusion criteria and flawed inference, and for the caution against treating those features as causal. Caveat: this is a methodological critique, not evidence that collaborative or sustained formats fail. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10101575/
TNTP, The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development (executive summary), 2015, with Hill, H. C., Review of The Mirage, National Education Policy Center, September 2015. Source for the estimate of roughly 19 school days and $18,000 per teacher per year on development in the districts studied. Caveat: Hill’s review argues the study relied on unstable evaluation ratings and measured PD by format rather than quality, making its broad conclusions unsupported. https://www.nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/ttr_hill_tntp_mirage.pdf

Frequently Asked Questions

Are workshops a waste of money?

No, but they are frequently mispriced. A ninety-minute session that puts a practice on the table, demonstrates it, and sends people out with a usable artifact is cheap and worth doing. A full day booked as an instructional change, with no follow-up and no protected implementation time, costs a great deal and predictably produces little. The spending problem is not workshops existing. It is buying a format designed for awareness and then expecting it to deliver changed practice.

What if our school genuinely cannot afford coaching?

Then build the return visit out of the people you already have. Paired peer visits cost release time rather than consultant fees: twenty protected minutes in week two and again in week five, with no form and no rating. That is not the coaching the meta-analysis measured and I would not claim the same effect size. It is, however, the same mechanism — somebody sees the real lesson and talks about it afterward — and it is available to a department with no budget at all.

Does peer observation make teachers feel watched or judged?

It can, and that is a design problem worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. The fix is separating it completely from evaluation: no form, no rating, no report to an administrator, pairs chosen by teachers where possible, and a single agreed question rather than a general critique. If a principal needs observation data, that is a different activity with a different name. Mixing the two kills the honest conversation that makes the visit useful in the first place.

How do I object to a badly designed workshop without damaging my standing?

Ask about logistics instead of value. “How many sessions is this across the term?” and “Will anyone be coming by to see us try it?” are operational questions with clean answers, and they expose the follow-up gap without putting the presenter on trial. If the answers are none and nobody, you have learned what the session is for rather than criticized anyone. Save the design argument for whoever actually builds the calendar, and bring the checklist instead of a complaint.

Should new teachers be in the same workshops as veterans?

Often not, and the mismatch is one of the most common complaints about staff development for teachers. A first-year teacher usually needs classroom systems before content pedagogy; a fifteen-year veteran may already run the practice being introduced. Required compliance content should stay universal, but instructional strands can reasonably split, and offering two or three paths rarely costs more than one. Where splitting is impossible, giving veterans a facilitation role is better than seating them through an introduction.

Is there any evidence that choice in professional development improves outcomes?

Not clean causal evidence, and I would rather say so than imply otherwise. Relevance and active learning appear on the correlational feature lists, and those lists have been criticized for methodology that cannot support causal claims. My position on choice is professional judgment, not research: a teacher who selected the session has already decided the problem matters, which removes the largest barrier to trying anything. Treat choice as a reasonable design principle, not a proven lever.

Does any of this change what happens to students?

Indirectly, and more slowly than most plans assume. The chain runs from what a teacher learns, to what they try, to whether the attempt survives, to whether students do something different with their thinking. A single workshop reaches the first link. Students notice the later links — a clearer explanation, a better question, feedback that arrives while the work still matters. If a professional learning plan cannot describe the student-facing change it is aiming at, it probably will not produce one.

What should a school report after a workshop instead of attendance numbers?

Name the practice, the number of teachers who attempted it in a specific class, what was seen on the follow-up visits, and what the department decided to keep or drop. If none of that is known yet, the honest report is that the session was awareness and implementation has not begun. Reporting “forty staff trained” is reporting an input as an outcome, and once that habit sets in, nobody in the building can tell which initiatives are real.

About Clay Shumate

Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher in the public schools of West Alabama, with seven years of classroom experience, a B.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education. He writes about project-based learning, student responsibility, respect, and practical ways to hold young people to a higher standard while giving them room to learn from mistakes. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and writes to its Code of Ethics; this site’s editorial standards and corrections policy are published in full. More about Clay.

October 7, 2026

Free Professional Development for Teachers: Where the Good Stuff Comes From, and What Free Costs

By Clay Shumate

Free professional development for teachers is real, and some of the best content-specific material available costs nothing: federal agencies, museums, libraries and public media all run it. What free usually does not include is the expensive part — somebody who responds to your work — and it rarely carries the credit hours a license renewal needs. Know which you are short of before you start looking.

This article is a map of where genuinely good free PD comes from, with working links, plus an honest accounting of what free costs you instead of money. It is not a list of recommendations and nothing here is endorsed. This site takes no money from any professional development provider, and I am naming these as factual examples of what exists.

Key Takeaways

Federal agencies and national museums run substantial free PD, and it tends to be the most content-specific material a secondary teacher can find at no cost.
Some free programs pay you. National Endowment for the Humanities summer institutes for K-12 educators carry participant stipends.
Free PD from a company is usually product training. That is not a scandal, but know what you are learning: the tool, not the teaching.
Free rarely means credit. Most free offerings do not generate the documented hours or graduate credit a state renewal requires, and state rules differ.
The most underrated free PD is structured time with a colleague, and the research on teacher collaboration is stronger than the research on most courses.
What free actually costs is your time and your follow-through. Nobody is waiting for your work, so you have to arrange for somebody to be.

Is free professional development for teachers actually any good?

Some of it is better than things people pay for, and the reason is funding rather than charity. A federal agency, a national museum or a central bank runs educator programs because public outreach is part of its mission, not because PD is its revenue stream. That changes what the material is for.

Judge it the same way you judge anything: is it specific to your subject, is it long enough to matter, does anyone respond to your work, and does it leave you something you can use. The criteria do not change because the price did. Our writeup on how to judge whether any PD course is worth your time includes a scoring checklist that works on free offerings too.

Where free material tends to be strong: content knowledge, primary sources, subject-specific depth, and ready-made classroom materials. Where it tends to be weak: feedback on your teaching, accountability, and anything resembling coaching. That pattern holds across almost every category below.

Federally funded and government-run programs

This is the first place to look, and most teachers never do. Several federal agencies run educator programs that are free by design.

The Library of Congress teacher professional development program describes itself as free primary-source-based professional development and includes onsite Teaching with Primary Sources workshops, self-guided online modules, webinars led by Library education specialists, ready-to-facilitate staff development content, and a regional partner network. For a history, English or government teacher, the primary-source modules are about as on-target as free material gets.

Federal Reserve Education publishes economics and personal finance resources for grades K-12 and college, and runs free webinars and self-paced courses. As of October 2026 the site lists free self-paced professional development certificate courses and digital badge modules issued through Credly, and at least one webinar listing states that participants receive one hour of professional development credit. A free account is needed for some features such as answer keys. If you teach economics, government, or a personal finance requirement, this is the most directly useful free option I am aware of in that content area.

The National Archives runs DocsTeach, which is free and hosted with funding from the National Archives Foundation. It is primarily a document and activity library rather than a course — thousands of primary sources plus activities built by other teachers, and tools to build and share your own. Treat it as material and a model of document-based task design rather than as training.

The National Endowment for the Humanities also runs EDSITEment, a free K-12 humanities resource with peer-reviewed material and several hundred lesson plans.

One more category, worth knowing exists: the Institute of Education Sciences funds ten Regional Educational Laboratories on a 2022-2027 contract cycle. Alongside applied research, each provides training, coaching and technical support for implementing evidence-based practices. Those partnerships are arranged with states and districts rather than individual teachers, so the realistic route for one teacher is the published reports and webinars — or asking whoever handles curriculum in your system whether your REL is already a partner.

Six cards listing sources of free teacher professional development, from federal agencies and museums to stipended summer institutes and colleagues in the same building. — Six categories, in rough order of how often teachers overlook them.

Museums, libraries and cultural institutions

National museums produce free educator programming of a quality that is hard to buy.

The Smithsonian Learning Lab is free to use, with millions of digital assets across history, art, culture and science. It also runs a professional development series called Cultivating Learning, in which Smithsonian educators model teaching techniques for using digital museum resources; the site describes these as free and accessible to anyone.

PBS LearningMedia is free with a free account and provides videos, interactives and lesson plans. Note the distinction: the LearningMedia library itself is free, while PBS TeacherLine is a separate line of graduate-level courses, and you should check its terms directly rather than assuming the free label carries over.

And the category where free PD can actually pay you. The NEH summer programs for K-12 educators are one-to-four-week institutes that convene teachers to study a humanities topic in depth, and the page states that participant stipends are based on program format and duration. For the 2026 cycle, the page lists applications opening December 8, 2025, closing March 6, 2026, with all applicants notified by April 6, 2026. If you have ever wanted several uninterrupted weeks inside your own subject, this is the structure that exists for it. It is competitive and it costs you the summer weeks, which is a real cost.

Local institutions follow the same pattern smaller. State humanities councils, state archives, historical societies, art museums and science centers frequently run free or stipended teacher workshops that never appear in a national search. Get on their educator mailing lists.

Professional associations

Associations are a mixed bag, and the honest summary is that the good material usually sits behind membership.

Most subject-area associations charge dues, so journals, conference content and member webinars are not free. What is often freely available: position statements, standards documents, some archived webinars and public-facing guidance — genuinely useful for understanding what your field considers good practice. Before paying dues, check whether your district already holds an institutional membership, because teachers routinely buy access their system already has.

Open courseware and self-paced modules

Open courseware is excellent for shoring up content knowledge and nearly useless for changing your teaching.

University open courseware and free online course platforms can give a secondary teacher real depth in a subject they teach at the edge of their training — the chemistry teacher covering a physics section, the social studies teacher assigned economics, anybody teaching outside their primary certification area. That is a legitimate and underrated use of free material.

What it will not do is tell you how to teach that content to fourteen-year-olds. Open courseware is usually built from university lectures for university students, and the pedagogy in it is aimed at that audience. Take the content and do your own translation; our material on checking for understanding during a lesson is the shortest path from content knowledge to something students experience. Completion is the known weak point of self-paced free material, so expect to need a deadline and a reason.

Four-row graphic listing the real costs of free professional development: teacher time, missing accountability, no feedback, and the lack of renewal credit. — Free is a price change, not a cost removal.

Free from vendors: name the catch

Free PD from a company is usually training on that company’s product, and that is fine as long as you know it.

The clearest example of the category: Google for Education’s educator certifications. As of October 2026 the page lists Level 1 and Level 2 Certified Educator and Gemini Certified Educator as valid for three years and free of charge, with training materials in a learning center. That is a real, substantive, no-cost credential. It is also, by definition, training in one company’s tools. Both things are true at once. Prices and offerings in this category change often, so check the page rather than trusting this paragraph in two years.

The pattern to watch for across the vendor category: a free webinar that is a product demo, a free course that only works if your school buys the platform, a certificate whose value depends on one company continuing to exist, and a free library whose account is used for sales contact. None of that is dishonest. It is marketing.

My own test is simple. Ask what this material teaches that would still be true if the company went out of business tomorrow. If the answer is nothing, it is tool training. Tool training has a place — if your district has adopted a platform, learning it properly is a reasonable use of two hours — but do not file it under professional learning about teaching. Our rundown of tools that support project work stays deliberately agnostic for the same reason.

The most underrated free PD: structured time with a colleague

The free option with the best research behind it is not a course at all. It is organized collaboration with the teachers already in your building.

Matthew Ronfeldt, Susanna Owens Farmer, Kiel McQueen and Jason Grissom studied more than 9,000 teachers across 336 schools in Miami-Dade County Public Schools using survey data from 2010 to 2012. Eighty-five percent of teachers reported participating in instructional teams. They found that high-quality collaboration — and collaboration about assessment in particular — was associated with greater student achievement gains, and that the effect extended to the students of teachers who were not themselves the strongest collaborators. Their conclusion: “Student achievement gains are greater in schools with stronger collaborative environments and in classrooms of teachers who are stronger collaborators” (summarized in Learning Forward’s journal, October 2015; the study is Ronfeldt et al., American Educational Research Journal, 52(3), 2015, pp. 475-514).

Note what that study does and does not show. It is correlational and it is one large urban district. It does not prove that scheduling more meetings produces achievement. What it supports is that the quality of what teachers do together tracks with outcomes, which is a more interesting claim than “collaboration is good.”

The coaching evidence points the same direction. Kraft, Blazar and Hogan’s meta-analysis of 60 causal studies found teacher coaching produced effects of 0.49 standard deviations on instruction and 0.18 on student achievement, with effects shrinking substantially as programs scaled (Kraft, Blazar & Hogan, 2018). The active ingredient in coaching is somebody watching you teach and responding. A colleague can do that for free, and a small arrangement between two teachers is closer to the small efficacy trials than to the large programs where the effects faded.

Here is my position on this, offered as opinion. Keeping your ears open and your mouth closed sometimes pays off. But sometimes keeping your ears open and asking questions really pays off. I have borrowed practices from other teachers, and I got them by asking — not by waiting to absorb them. The teachers around you have already solved problems you are currently losing to, and almost none of them have written it down. Asking is the cheapest professional development available and the one most of us use least.

How to actually set that up

The thing that separates this from a hallway conversation is structure. A four-step version that does not require anyone’s permission:

Pick one specific problem. Not “classroom management.” “Students stop working in the last eight minutes of class.” Specific problems get specific answers.
Ask one person who you suspect has solved it. Say what you are struggling with and what you have already tried. Teachers answer that question generously and almost nobody asks it.
Trade an observation. Ask to watch one period of theirs, and offer one of yours. During your planning period, this costs nothing but nerve, and it is the part that does the work.
Debrief with one question. “What did you see students doing in the first five minutes?” is better than “how did I do?” because it produces information instead of reassurance.

If you want a structure for processing what you notice afterward, a practical approach to teacher reflection is free and takes about ten minutes a week.

What does free PD actually cost?

Time, follow-through, and usually credit. Those are the three prices, and they are not trivial.

What free PD costs	Why it bites	What to do about it
Your own hours	Nothing is scheduled for you and no sub is arranged. The time comes from evenings, planning periods or summer.	Block it on a calendar like a meeting. Unscheduled intentions lose to grading every time.
No accountability	Nobody takes attendance and nobody notices if you stop in week two.	Tell one colleague your deadline and what you will show them.
No feedback	The scarce, expensive part of PD is a person who responds to your work. Free material almost never includes it.	Trade observations with a colleague, or bring a student work sample to a department meeting.
Rarely any credit	Most free offerings do not generate the documented hours or graduate credit a state renewal needs.	Verify with your state licensing office before counting on it. Some free programs do document hours; most do not.
Search cost	Good free PD is scattered across agencies, museums and councils with no central listing.	Spend one hour joining educator mailing lists. Then it arrives instead of being hunted.
Uneven quality	No price signal, and some free material is thin or dated.	Apply the same criteria you would to a paid course. Free does not exempt it.

Four-row graphic showing how two teachers can set up a free peer observation exchange, from naming a specific problem to debriefing with one focused question. — Eight hours and some nerve, with no approval needed from anyone.

Will free PD count toward license renewal?

Often not, and you need to check before you count on it. Nearly every state ties license renewal to some form of continuing education, but the accepted providers, the hour-to-credit conversions and the documentation requirements are set state by state.

A 2018 New America report on relicensure found that most state systems are organized around accumulating approved credits rather than demonstrating growth, such that “whether a teacher grows considerably while fulfilling her state’s renewal requirements or does not improve at all is of no consequence” as long as the credits clear (Rethinking Relicensure). The practical consequence for free PD is that excellent uncredited learning and mediocre credited learning are not interchangeable on your renewal paperwork.

I am not going to tell you how your renewal works, because it depends on your state and it changes. What I will say is to separate the two questions. “What will make me better at this?” and “what will clear my renewal requirement?” are different questions with different answers, and the continuing-education question deserves its own research with your own state’s certification office rather than an answer from a blog. Some free programs do document hours — the Federal Reserve webinar listing above states a professional development credit, and badge-issuing programs produce a record — but documentation is not the same as your state accepting it.

A four-week plan to build your own free PD

If you want a starting structure rather than a list, this is what I would do with four weeks and no budget. It assumes about two hours a week.

Week 1: Name the problem and find the content. Write down one thing your students consistently struggle with in your subject. Then spend ninety minutes in the agency or museum collection closest to your content area looking specifically for material about that, not browsing generally.
Week 2: Ask a person. Identify one colleague who seems to handle that problem better than you do and ask them how. Arrange to watch one of their class periods during your planning time.
Week 3: Build one thing. Make a single usable artifact — a task, a document set, a rubric, a sequence of questions — that combines what you found and what you saw. Not a unit. One artifact.
Week 4: Use it and look at the work. Teach it, then read what students produced and decide whether to keep, fix or drop it. Tell the colleague what happened.

Total cost: eight hours and some nerve. That sequence has more of the features the research associates with effective PD — content focus, modeling, practice, feedback, implementation — than most one-day workshops do. It is also, as far as I know, the only version you can start this week without anyone’s approval.

Where to start with free professional development for teachers

Start with the agency or museum closest to what you teach, and start with one problem rather than one browse. If you teach history or English, the Library of Congress modules and the National Archives material are the obvious first stop. Economics or personal finance, Federal Reserve Education. Science or art, the Smithsonian collections. If you have a summer to give and a subject you love, the NEH institutes are the most serious free option on this page, and they pay a stipend.

Then add the part the free material leaves out: one person who will look at your work. That is the whole gap, and a colleague closes it for nothing.

Two cautions before you go. Verify any credit claim with your own state rather than the provider. And if you are weighing a paid option against these, read the criteria for judging whether a course is worth the money first, and what specifically changes when PD moves online if the format is the question. After seven years of classroom experience, the free thing I would defend hardest is still the simplest: ask the teacher down the hall how they did it.

Sources

Library of Congress, Professional Development for Teachers. The source for the Library’s description of its offerings as free primary-source-based professional development, including Teaching with Primary Sources workshops, self-paced modules and webinars. Caveat: program availability and formats change; confirm current offerings on the page. https://www.loc.gov/programs/teachers/professional-development/
Federal Reserve Education. The source for free K-12 economics and personal finance resources, free self-paced professional development certificate courses, Credly-issued badge modules, and a webinar listing stating one hour of professional development credit. Caveat: described as of October 2026; offerings and credit statements change. https://www.federalreserveeducation.org/
National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Programs for K-12 Educators. The source for one-to-four-week institutes, the statement that participant stipends are based on program format and duration, and the 2026 application dates (open December 8, 2025; close March 6, 2026; notification April 6, 2026). Caveat: stipend amounts are not published on this page and vary by program; application cycles change annually. https://www.neh.gov/divisions/education/summer-programs
Smithsonian Learning Lab. The source for the free platform description and the Cultivating Learning professional development series in which Smithsonian educators model teaching techniques. https://learninglab.si.edu/
Google for Education, Certification Programs. The source for the statement that Level 1, Level 2 and Gemini educator certifications are listed as valid for three years and free of charge. Caveat: checked October 2026; this is training in one company’s products and its terms and pricing can change at any time. Naming it here is description, not endorsement. https://edu.google.com/for-educators/certification-programs/
Ronfeldt, M., Farmer, S. O., McQueen, K., & Grissom, J. A., “Teacher Collaboration in Instructional Teams and Student Achievement,” American Educational Research Journal, 52(3), 2015, pp. 475-514, as summarized in Learning Forward’s journal, October 2015. The source for the 9,000-plus teachers across 336 Miami-Dade schools, the 85 percent instructional team participation, and the association between collaboration quality and achievement gains. Caveat: correlational, one large urban district, survey data from 2010-2012; this is a summary of the study rather than the paper itself. https://learningforward.org/journal/october-2015-issue/high-quality-collaboration-benefits-teachers-and-students/
New America, Rethinking Relicensure: Promoting Professional Learning Through Teacher Licensure Policies, August 2018. The source for the finding that most state renewal systems are organized around credit accumulation rather than demonstrated growth. https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/policy-papers/rethinking-relicensure/

Frequently Asked Questions

Why would anyone pay for PD if good free options exist?

Because money buys the part free material almost never includes: a person who reads your work and responds to it, plus documented hours a state will accept for renewal. Free offerings are strongest on content knowledge and classroom materials and weakest on feedback and accountability. If what you need is depth in your subject, free is often equal or better. If what you need is coaching or credit, that is usually what you are paying for, and it is worth paying for.

Can I count free professional development toward my license renewal?

Sometimes, but never assume it. Renewal rules, approved provider lists, hour-to-credit conversions and documentation requirements are set state by state, and a program that issues a certificate or badge is not the same as a program your state will accept. Check with your own state certification office before you rely on anything, and keep whatever documentation the provider gives you. Treat growth and credit as two separate questions with two separate answers.

Is free PD from a company a bad idea?

Not bad, just narrow. A company’s free training teaches its product, which is genuinely useful if your district has already adopted that platform and you need to use it well. The thing to avoid is filing tool training under professional learning about teaching. A simple test: ask what this material teaches that would still be true if the company disappeared tomorrow. If the answer is nothing, you have learned software, which is fine as long as you know that is what happened.

How do I find the local free programs that never show up in a search?

Get on educator mailing lists. State humanities councils, state archives, regional historical societies, art museums, science centers and public university outreach offices frequently run free or stipended teacher workshops that are advertised only to their own lists. It is roughly an hour of signup work once, after which opportunities arrive instead of being hunted. Asking whoever handles curriculum in your system what they already receive is the other fast route.

Is asking a colleague for help going to make me look incompetent?

It reads as the opposite to most teachers, especially when the question is specific. “My students stop working in the last eight minutes, what do you do?” is a craft question, and craft questions are flattering to receive. Vague requests are what feel awkward, for both people. If it still feels risky, start by offering something: ask to watch one of their periods and offer one of yours. A trade is easier to accept than a favor.

Should a principal count free PD as real professional learning for staff?

Judged on the same criteria as anything else, much of it holds up, and the federal and museum material is often more content-specific than what a building can afford to bring in. The honest caution runs the other way: free PD is not a substitute for coaching, because coaching is labor and labor costs money. A plan that replaces paid follow-up with free content has cut the part the evidence most supports, and that is worth saying out loud in a budget conversation.

Does observing a colleague raise fairness or privacy issues?

It can, which is why the arrangement should be voluntary, reciprocal and kept away from evaluation. A peer visit is not an evaluation, nothing about it belongs in anyone’s personnel file, and what you see students do stays between the two teachers. Tell your administrator what you are doing so it does not look like something else, and do not record anything. The value comes from the exchange, and the exchange depends on it being safe for both people.

What do students get out of a teacher doing free PD on their own time?

Whatever actually reaches the classroom, which is the only part that counts. Done well, it shows up as a task worth doing, a document set that is not condescending, clearer feedback, or an assessment that matches what was taught. Done badly, it shows up as nothing, or as a tired teacher. That is a real trade-off and worth being honest about. The four-week plan in this article ends with reading student work for exactly that reason.

About Clay Shumate

October 7, 2026

Professional Growth as a Teacher: Goals That Survive Past October

By Clay Shumate

Professional growth as a teacher means getting measurably better at something you chose, on purpose, over a stretch of time long enough to see it in student work. It is not the same as the goal you typed into an evaluation form in August. A real growth goal is narrow, observable, revisited on a schedule, and owned by the teacher rather than assigned to them.

Most teacher goal-setting fails for a boring reason. The goal is written once, for someone else, in language vague enough to be safe, and then nobody looks at it until spring. That is not a flaw in teachers. It is what happens when a system asks you to produce a document instead of change a practice. This article is about the difference, and about what a goal has to look like to survive October.

Key Takeaways

A growth goal and a compliance goal are different objects. One is designed to change your practice; the other is designed to be submitted. Writing one when you needed the other wastes a year.
Narrow beats ambitious. Goals that name a specific student behavior you can see in student work get revisited. Goals about “rigor” or “engagement” do not.
Goal-setting theory is strong evidence, mostly from outside classrooms. Locke and Latham’s research base is enormous, but it is largely workplace and laboratory task performance, not teaching practice. Say so rather than overselling it.
Feedback is not optional. In the goal-setting research, goals plus feedback outperform goals alone. A goal with no check-in is a wish.
Complex work weakens the effect. The same research shows goal effects shrink as tasks get more complex, and teaching is about as complex as work gets.
The features that make professional learning work are known. Content focus, collaboration, coaching, modeling, feedback and sustained duration. Build the goal so those are possible.

What is professional growth as a teacher?

It is the deliberate improvement of one part of your practice, chosen by you, tracked against evidence you can actually look at. That definition deliberately excludes three things people often mean by the phrase: accumulating credentials, accumulating hours, and being rated higher.

Credentials and hours are inputs. They might produce growth and they might not. Ratings are a judgment made by someone else using an instrument that may not detect the thing you were working on. The growth itself is the change in what students do, and the only honest way to know whether it happened is to look at student work from October and student work from February and tell the truth about the difference. That is a higher bar than most goal forms ask for, and the only version worth your time.

Why do most teacher goals die in October?

Because they were written to be filed, not used. Three failure patterns account for most of it.

The goal is unobservable. “I will increase student engagement in my classes” has no moment at which you can check. There is no artifact. There is no number. There is nothing to be wrong about, which feels safe in August and useless in January.

The goal is too large. “I will implement project-based learning across all my units” is a year of curriculum rewriting disguised as a goal. It gets abandoned, and the abandonment feels like a personal failure rather than a scoping error.

The goal has no schedule. Nothing in the calendar says “look at this.” If a goal does not appear in your week, it does not exist. This is the most fixable of the three and the most commonly skipped.

There is a system-level version of this too. New America’s 2018 review of relicensure policy in all fifty states and the District of Columbia found that only eleven states articulate the purpose of relicensure at all, and summarized the typical system this way: “whether a teacher grows considerably while fulfilling her state’s renewal requirements or does not improve at all is of no consequence under most renewal systems” (New America, August 2018). When the structure above you is indifferent to whether you improved, the paperwork becomes the point. The mechanics of license renewal are worth understanding on their own terms, but they will not generate a goal for you.

Four conditions for a workable teacher professional goal: observable, bounded, scheduled and teacher-chosen — If you cannot tell by Friday whether the week counted, the goal is still too broad.

What does the evidence on goal-setting actually say?

Goal-setting is one of the better-supported findings in applied psychology, and almost none of that research ran in classrooms. Both halves of that sentence matter.

Locke and Latham’s 2002 summary in American Psychologist reports a research base of “well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants in at least eight countries,” in laboratory, simulation and field settings, over time spans from one minute to twenty-five years. The core findings are consistent. Specific, difficult goals outperform telling people to do their best, with effect sizes reported from .42 to .80. Goal difficulty relates positively and roughly linearly to performance, with effect sizes from .52 to .82. And “goals plus feedback is more effective than goals alone” (Locke and Latham, American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717, 2002).

Now the caveats, because they are the useful part. The participants were overwhelmingly workers and students performing bounded tasks, not teachers changing instructional practice. I am extrapolating when I apply this to your professional goal, and I want that said plainly rather than buried. The same paper also reports that task complexity moderates the effect downward: effect sizes for goal difficulty fell from .67 on simple tasks to .48 on complex ones, and the advantage of specific difficult goals over “do your best” fell from .77 to .41. Teaching a class of thirty adolescents is not a simple task. We should expect the smaller number, not the larger one.

What survives translation is the mechanism, not the effect size: specificity helps, difficulty helps up to a point, feedback is required, and commitment depends on whether you think the goal matters and whether you believe you can hit it.

Growth goal or compliance goal?

You often need both, and the mistake is submitting one and believing you wrote the other. Write the compliance goal in the form your district asks for. Then write the real one for yourself, in plain language, somewhere you will see it.

Feature	Compliance goal	Growth goal
Audience	Evaluator, district system	You, and anyone you have asked to check on you
Scope	Broad enough to be defensible	Narrow enough to observe in one class period
Evidence	A rating, a form, a summative number	Student work, a tally, a recording, a short survey
Timeline	Written in August, revisited in May	Checked on a named schedule, often every two or three weeks
Language	“Increase student engagement and rigor”	“Every student speaks in whole-class discussion at least once a week”
Failure	Looks bad, so it is avoided	Expected, informative, and the reason to revise
Ownership	Often assigned or heavily steered	Chosen by the teacher from a problem they can see

If your district’s system lets you set your own goal, use it for the real one. Many do. The compliance version is frequently a habit rather than a requirement, so check whether the form actually prohibits what you want.

Where do you find a goal worth setting?

In the pile of student work that bothers you. Not in a professional-learning catalog, and not in the standards document.

Try this. Take one set of recent student work — a short answer, an exit ticket, a lab writeup, a draft. Sort it into three piles: did the thing, partly did the thing, did not do the thing. Then look at the middle pile and ask what specifically is missing. That is your goal territory, and it will be smaller and more concrete than whatever you would have written from memory.

The honest version is uncomfortable, which is the point. Reflection that does not risk finding something wrong is not reflection. A good diagnostic question: what do I keep explaining again because it did not land the first time? That repetition is data, and it is free.

Two other reliable sources of goals. First, whatever your formative checks keep telling you and you keep not acting on. Second, the thing you avoid teaching because it goes badly. Neither will appear on a district priority list.

What makes a goal narrow enough to work?

You should be able to tell, by Friday, whether this week counted. That is the test. If you cannot, the goal is too broad or the evidence is too vague.

Four conditions

Observable. There is an artifact or a count. Student work, a tally sheet, a seating chart with marks on it, a two-question survey, a recording of ten minutes of class.
Bounded. One class, one unit, one routine, or one skill. Not “my practice.”
Scheduled. A named day and interval for checking. On the calendar, with the check itself under ten minutes.
Yours. You picked it. Commitment in the goal-setting research depends on whether you think the outcome matters and whether you believe you can reach it — and an assigned goal fails both tests more often than an assigned goal’s author expects.

One more condition, not from the research literature: the goal has to be survivable on a bad week. If the check takes twenty minutes and needs a quiet room, it will not happen in November. Design for the worst week of the semester.

Comparison of compliance-oriented teacher goals and genuine professional growth goals across four features — You often need both. The mistake is writing one and believing you wrote the other.

Ten professional goals for teachers you can copy and adapt

These are written in usable form: a specific change, a specific piece of evidence, and an interval. Steal the shape, swap in your own content and class.

Instruction

Participation breadth. In my third-period class, every student contributes to whole-class discussion at least once per week. Evidence: a marked seating chart, tallied Friday. Check: weekly, and I rotate which class I track every six weeks.
Wait time. After I ask an open question, I wait at least five seconds before taking an answer or rephrasing. Evidence: audio of ten minutes of class, timed, twice a month. Check: biweekly.
Who does the thinking. In each unit, at least two tasks require students to produce an explanation rather than retrieve an answer. Evidence: the two task sheets, filed with the unit. Check: at unit close.
Front-loading less. I cut my opening direct instruction to twelve minutes or less in three lessons a week, with the remainder spent on student work I circulate through. Evidence: lesson timings noted on the plan. Check: Friday, five minutes.

Assessment and feedback

Feedback students act on. On two assignments per unit, students make a documented revision in response to my comments before a grade is final. Evidence: the revised drafts. Check: at unit close. Related: a structured correction process makes this considerably easier to sustain.
Shorter cycle. No major assignment goes more than five school days without returned feedback. Evidence: a dated log of returns. Check: weekly, two minutes.
Checking before moving on. I collect a one-question check at the end of every lesson in one unit and read them before planning the next day. Evidence: the stack. Check: nightly for one unit, then stop and evaluate whether it was worth it.

Classroom culture

Named repair. When a student and I have a conflict, I hold a two-minute private conversation within twenty-four hours before any consequence is finalized. Evidence: a running count of conversations held versus conflicts that occurred. Check: biweekly.
Non-academic contact. I have a conversation unrelated to coursework with at least five students a week, prioritizing the ones I talk to least. Evidence: a class list I mark through. Check: Friday. This is the mechanism behind most advice about building relationships with students, reduced to something countable.

Workload

A hard stop. I do no school work after 6:30 p.m. on three named weeknights, and I plan the week assuming it. Evidence: an honest tally on the calendar. Check: Sunday.

Notice what these have in common. Each names a behavior, an artifact and an interval. Each can be checked in under ten minutes. And each can fail in a way that tells you something, which is the whole point of writing it down.

How often should a goal be revisited?

Often enough that you cannot forget it, rarely enough that checking is not a second job. For most of the goals above, every two weeks is about right, with a longer review at each grading period.

The structure I would recommend: a five-minute check on a fixed day, a fifteen-minute review each grading period, and one decision point at the semester break — keep, revise, or retire. Carrying a dead goal for five more months because abandoning it would look bad is the actual failure.

Put the check in the same slot as something you already do reliably: grade entry, the Friday email. A goal attached to an existing habit survives; a goal that needs its own new habit usually does not.

Does self-assessment work, or do we just flatter ourselves?

Self-assessment is useful when it is anchored to evidence and unreliable when it is anchored to memory. This is why every goal above names an artifact.

The Learning Policy Institute’s 2017 review of 35 studies with experimental, quasi-experimental or appropriately modeled designs found that high-quality professional development “frequently provides built-in time for teachers to think about, receive input on, and make changes to their practice” (Darling-Hammond, Hyler and Gardner, 2017). Note the three verbs: think, receive input, change. Reflection without input, and reflection that changes nothing, are not the thing the research describes.

So build in a second set of eyes, even informally. Hand a colleague one piece of evidence and ask one question about it. That is a small enough ask that people say yes, and it converts self-assessment from a private opinion into something checkable.

Four methods for identifying a teacher professional growth goal from existing classroom evidence — The goal is usually already in the room; it is rarely in a catalog.

What about the goal my evaluator assigns?

Treat it as a constraint to satisfy honestly, not as your growth plan, and do not pretend the two are the same. An assigned goal can be a perfectly reasonable goal. It is just unlikely to carry the commitment that the goal-setting research says you need, because you did not pick it.

Two practical moves. First, see if the assigned goal and your real goal can overlap. They often can with a sentence of rewriting, because district goals are usually written broadly enough to contain something specific. Second, if they genuinely cannot, do both and keep them separate. Satisfy the form on the form’s terms. Do the real work on yours.

If you are the person assigning goals, the implication is uncomfortable but worth hearing. A goal you wrote for a teacher is a directive, and directives are a legitimate tool. Just do not call it professional growth and expect it to behave like a goal the teacher owns. The more useful move is to help them narrow the goal they already have, which is most of what a staff that trusts its own collective capacity does for each other.

What does coaching add, and what are the limits of that evidence?

Coaching has the strongest causal evidence of any professional development format, and the evidence comes mostly from grade levels that are not ours. Both things are true and the second gets left out constantly.

Kraft, Blazar and Hogan’s 2018 meta-analysis in Review of Educational Research pooled the causal evidence and found coaching improved instruction by 0.49 standard deviations across 43 studies and raised student achievement by 0.18 SD across 31 studies. It also found a sharp scale effect: smaller programs improved instruction by 0.63 SD and achievement by 0.28 SD, roughly twice and three times the effects of larger programs, which came in at 0.34 SD and 0.10 SD (Kraft, Blazar and Hogan, Review of Educational Research, 88(4), 547–588, 2018).

The caveat is substantial. Fifty-one of the sixty studies included teachers working in pre-kindergarten centers or elementary schools, and nearly all content-specific coaching targeted reading and literacy. If you teach grade 9 chemistry, those numbers are suggestive, not a forecast. The scale finding is also a warning about district-wide rollouts: the thing that worked small got weaker when it got big. A single colleague who looks at one piece of your evidence every few weeks is closer to the version that worked, and you can arrange that yourself, this month, for free.

The time problem nobody writes into the goal

If a goal does not account for the hours you do not have, it is a fantasy. In the U.S. results of the 2018 TALIS survey of lower secondary teachers — grades 7 through 9, squarely our population — 49 percent named conflict with their work schedule as a barrier to professional development and 42 percent named family responsibilities (NCES, TALIS 2018).

That is why goal ten is about workload. Design the check to take five minutes, inside the school day. If you cannot, shrink the goal until you can.

Professional growth as a teacher: what to do in the next three weeks

Professional growth as a teacher starts with one narrow goal and a five-minute check on a named day, not with a better form. Here is the whole plan.

This week, pull one set of student work and sort it into three piles. Look at the middle pile and name what is missing in one sentence. Next week, turn that sentence into a goal with an artifact and an interval, and write the check into your calendar on a day you are already reliable. The week after, do the check and hand one piece of the evidence to a colleague with a single question attached.

Then keep going to the semester break and make an honest call: keep, revise, or retire. If what you need is materials rather than another framework, free classroom materials worth printing are easier to find than most teachers think, and everything in our own resource library downloads directly with no email required. Write the small goal and look at it.

Sources

Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey,” American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717, 2002. Supports the effect-size ranges for goal specificity and difficulty, the goals-plus-feedback finding, the commitment mechanism, and the task-complexity moderation. Caveat: the research base is over 100 tasks and more than 40,000 participants in laboratory, simulation and workplace field settings — not teachers changing instructional practice. Applying it to teacher goal-setting is an extrapolation, and the complexity moderator predicts smaller effects for work as complex as teaching. https://home.ubalt.edu/tmitch/642/articles%20syllabus/locke%20pract%20goal%20setting%202002%20am%20psy.pdf
Matthew A. Kraft, David Blazar and Dylan Hogan, “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence,” Review of Educational Research, 88(4), 547–588, 2018. Supports the 0.49 SD instruction and 0.18 SD achievement effects and the small-versus-large program comparison. Caveat: 51 of the 60 studies involved pre-kindergarten or elementary teachers, and nearly all content-specific coaching targeted reading and literacy, so these figures do not transfer cleanly to grades 6–12. https://education.umd.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/inline-files/Kraft%20Blazar%20Hogan_2018_The%20Effect%20of%20Teacher%20Coaching_Review%20of%20Educational%20Research.pdf
Linda Darling-Hammond, Maria E. Hyler and Madelyn Gardner, Effective Teacher Professional Development, Learning Policy Institute, 2017. Supports the seven features of effective professional development and the quoted description of built-in reflection time, drawn from a review of 35 studies using experimental, quasi-experimental or appropriately modeled designs. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Effective_Teacher_Professional_Development_REPORT.pdf
TNTP, The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development (executive summary), 2015. Supports the finding that no type, amount or combination of development activity reliably produced substantial improvement, alongside roughly $18,000 per teacher per year in spending and about 19 school days of teacher time. Caveat: three large districts and one midsize charter network, not a national sample, and the summary does not report grade levels. https://tntp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TNTP_Mirage_Executive_Summary_2015.pdf
New America, Rethinking Relicensure: Promoting Professional Learning Through Teacher Licensure Renewal Policies, August 2018. Supports the finding that only eleven states articulate the purpose of relicensure and the quoted critique of compliance-oriented renewal systems, from a review of all fifty states and the District of Columbia. https://newamerica.org/education-policy/policy-papers/rethinking-relicensure
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, TALIS 2018 U.S. Highlights. Supports the barrier percentages — 49 percent work schedule, 47 percent lack of incentives, 42 percent family responsibilities, 38 percent cost. Caveat: these are self-reported barriers from U.S. lower secondary teachers in grades 7–9 in 2018, not a measure of outcomes. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/talis/talis2018/TALIS2018_compiled.pdf

Frequently Asked Questions

How many professional goals should I set at once?

One real one. Possibly two if they are genuinely small and share a check-in. The temptation is to set four, because four looks serious on a form, but four goals means none of them gets a scheduled look and all of them quietly expire. If your district form demands several, write them, then pick the one you actually intend to pursue and treat the rest as documentation. A single narrow goal that gets checked every two weeks for a semester will change more about your teaching than five goals read twice a year.

Is it a problem if my goal and my evaluation goal are different?

Not if you satisfy the evaluation goal honestly. District goals are usually written broadly enough that a specific personal goal fits inside one with a sentence of rewriting, so try the overlap first. When they genuinely cannot overlap, do both and keep them separate in your own mind. Meet the form on the form’s terms, and keep your real goal somewhere you will see it weekly. What does not work is writing one document, calling it both, and then being surprised in May that neither the growth nor the paperwork went well.

How strong is the evidence that goal-setting actually improves teaching?

Weaker than the general goal-setting literature suggests. Locke and Latham’s research base is enormous — over 100 tasks and more than 40,000 participants — but it is overwhelmingly workplace and laboratory task performance, not teachers changing practice. Their own data also show the effect shrinking as tasks get more complex, and teaching is extremely complex. What transfers is the mechanism rather than the effect size: be specific, make it hard enough to matter, get feedback, and pick it yourself. Treat anyone promising a particular gain from teacher goal-setting with suspicion.

What counts as evidence if I do not teach a tested subject?

Almost anything you can look at twice. A marked seating chart showing who spoke. Two student drafts, before and after your feedback. Ten minutes of audio from your own class. A tally of how many students brought the reading. A two-question survey. None of that requires a standardized test, and all of it is more honest about instructional change than a score would be. The requirement is not measurement precision, it is that the evidence exists outside your memory and that you could be wrong about it.

Does my goal have to be shared with my principal or my family community?

Your district decides what gets submitted, and that is a real constraint you should check rather than assume. Beyond the required paperwork, a growth goal is professional work in progress and does not need an audience. There is one caution worth naming: if a goal involves recording your class, collecting student survey responses, or sharing student work with a colleague, follow your district’s policy on student privacy and recording before you start. Those policies exist for good reasons and they vary considerably between districts.

What if the goal is not working by November?

Then you have learned something in November instead of May, which is the entire reason to check on a schedule. Ask whether the goal was too broad, whether the evidence was too vague, or whether the check itself was too expensive to sustain. Any of the three can be fixed by shrinking the goal. Retiring a goal that is not working is a legitimate decision and should be recorded as one. Carrying a dead goal for five more months because abandoning it would look bad is the actual failure.

Should students know what I am working on?

Often yes, and in grades 6 through 12 it tends to go better than teachers expect. Telling a class that you are trying to make sure everyone gets heard this semester, and asking them whether it is working, treats them as people with useful information about their own classroom. It also makes the goal harder to abandon quietly. Keep it specific and keep it about your practice rather than their deficits. What does not work is a vague announcement about engagement, which students correctly read as noise.

Is coaching worth asking for, given the evidence?

Yes, with realistic expectations. The Kraft, Blazar and Hogan meta-analysis found coaching improved instruction by 0.49 standard deviations, the strongest causal evidence for any professional development format. But 51 of the 60 studies involved pre-kindergarten or elementary teachers, mostly in literacy, and effects were roughly halved in large-scale programs compared with small ones. The practical read is that one colleague looking at one piece of your evidence every few weeks resembles the version that worked better than a district-wide rollout does. You can arrange that yourself.

About Clay Shumate

October 7, 2026

Online Professional Development for Teachers: What Changes When the Course Is on a Screen

By Clay Shumate

Online professional development for teachers is any structured course, workshop or cohort delivered over the internet rather than in a room. The format is not the problem people assume it is — the few head-to-head studies find outcomes roughly comparable to in-person delivery. The real differences are who is sitting next to you, who notices if you quit, and whether anybody checks that you tried it.

This is not an article about how to judge a course in general. That one is separate. This is about what specifically changes when the course moves onto a screen: what the evidence does and does not support, which design choices matter, and how to keep an asynchronous course from dying quietly in a browser tab.

Key Takeaways

Head-to-head comparisons are rare, and the ones that exist mostly find no meaningful difference. The honest summary is not “online works just as well” but “online has not been shown to work worse, on a thin evidence base.”
Much of the comparative research predates 2020, which means it describes a world where online PD was a deliberate choice rather than a mass default.
Cohorts beat solo self-pacing. A 2025 meta-analysis of more than 100 studies found online PD where several teachers participated together and at the same time had particularly strong effects.
Completion is the format’s real weakness. Across 221 MOOCs the median completion rate was 12.6 percent, and the first two weeks decide most of it.
Online wins on access. For a singleton teacher, a small school or a rural district, online PD is often the only subject-specific option that exists.
Online loses on accountability. Nobody is in the doorway asking whether you used the thing, so you have to build that yourself before you start.

Is online professional development for teachers as effective as in person?

On the available evidence, roughly comparable — but the evidence base is thin, mixed and older than most people assume. Three studies are worth knowing specifically.

The largest recent synthesis is a 2025 meta-analysis in Computers & Education by Fatlinda Morina, Tim Fütterer, Nicolas Hübner, Steffen Zitzmann and Christian Fischer, covering more than 100 studies of working teachers in grades 1 through 12 and their students. It found positive effects on both teachers and students, with the effects on teachers themselves larger than those on student outcomes. The feature that stood out was collaboration: according to the authors’ own summary of the work, online courses “in which several teachers were able to participate together and simultaneously had a particularly strong impact” (institutional summary of Morina et al., 2025, published by the authors’ research network). That is a summary, not the paper, which sits behind a paywall; I am naming it as such.

For a direct comparison, a 2017 study by David Webb, Hilarie Nickerson and Jeffrey Bush looked at computer science PD delivered online or blended versus face to face, covering 75 teachers and survey responses from 4,832 K-12 students collected between 2014 and 2016. With one exception, they found no negative student outcomes for teachers who took the online version; students of face-to-face participants reported more interest in making games at home on their own, which was the only statistically significant edge either way (Webb, Nickerson & Bush, SIGCSE 2017).

Earlier, a research team led by Barry Fishman compared 48 hours of face-to-face workshops against self-paced online coursework covering the same high school environmental science curriculum. Both groups came out with increased confidence, taught the materials as the designers intended, and their students learned comparable amounts. The detail I find most useful: online participants spent anywhere from 3 to 52 hours on the same material and still reached similar results (reported by Education Week, June 2013). Fishman’s own caution in that coverage is the one to keep: “There are no shortcuts in professional development.” His online condition was not a video library. It was structured coursework with facilitator contact and physical materials.

Why is the evidence thinner than it looks?

Because almost nobody runs the study that would settle it. Randomized comparisons of PD delivery models are, as Learning Forward’s René Islas put it in that same 2013 coverage, “few and far between.”

Three specific problems with the literature you should know before anyone quotes it at you:

Timing. A large share of the head-to-head work was done before 2020. Teachers’ baseline comfort with video platforms, and the share of PD delivered online, changed enormously after that. Old studies compared a novelty against the default. That is not the choice you are making now.
What “online” means. The label covers a facilitated eight-week cohort with assignments and a recorded webinar you half-watch while grading. Lumping those together produces averages that describe nothing.
Outcome drift. Many studies measure teacher satisfaction or self-reported confidence, which are easier to collect and much weaker than measured knowledge or student learning. When a provider cites research, check which of those it measured.

None of that means the format is suspect. It means the confident claims on both sides are overreaching, and the sensible stance is that delivery matters less than design — which is roughly what the comparison studies keep finding.

Four-row graphic comparing synchronous, asynchronous, cohort and self-paced online professional development formats and what each is best suited to. — The format question is really a question about what you need from other people.

Synchronous or asynchronous: which should you pick?

Synchronous for anything requiring rehearsal, discussion or discomfort. Asynchronous for anything requiring knowledge, reading or repetition.

Synchronous sessions earn their scheduling cost when the learning depends on other people being there: role-playing a conversation with a family, arguing about where a student’s reasoning broke down, watching somebody else’s lesson video and having to say something about it. You cannot get that from a recording, because the thing being learned is the exchange.

Asynchronous works well for the parts you need to absorb rather than negotiate: subject content you do not know well enough, a research base, a worked example you need to pause and rewind. It is also the only format that respects the fact that teachers are not free between 8:00 and 3:30.

The mixed version is usually the best buy: asynchronous content, synchronous practice. If a course is entirely synchronous, you are paying for scheduling you may not be able to keep. If it is entirely asynchronous with no live component at all, assume you will have to manufacture the discussion yourself.

Self-paced or cohort?

Cohort, if the option exists and the schedule is survivable. This is the one place the recent evidence points somewhere fairly clearly.

The 2025 meta-analysis found the strongest effects where teachers participated together and at the same time, and the authors concluded that effective online training “requires time and space for collaborative activities.” That lines up with what we know from outside the online literature: Matthew Kraft, David Blazar and Dylan Hogan’s meta-analysis of 60 causal studies found teacher coaching produced effects of 0.49 standard deviations on instruction and 0.18 on student achievement, with effects shrinking as programs scaled (Kraft, Blazar & Hogan, 2018). What coaching and cohorts share is a person who notices.

Self-paced has one genuine advantage worth naming: it is the only format that fits around a teaching schedule without negotiation. If a cohort meets Tuesdays at 4:15 and you coach, tutor or have your own kids at 4:15, the cohort is not a better option for you. It is a better option in general. Pick self-paced and then build in the accountability the format left out.

What are the completion rates for online courses?

Low, and the format is a large part of why. Katy Jordan’s 2015 analysis in the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning collected enrollment and completion data for 221 massive open online courses and found completion rates ranging from 0.7 percent to 52.1 percent, with a median of 12.6 percent. Longer courses had lower completion. The first and second weeks were decisive for engagement (Jordan, 2015).

Name the population before you use that number: those are open MOOCs with general audiences, mostly free, with no employer attached. A paid, facilitated PD course with a district behind it is a different animal, and you should not expect 12 percent.

Teachers do look better than average in that world. An analysis of four years of open online courses run by two large research universities on the edX platform — 290 courses, 4.5 million participants, 245,000 certificates — was reported by Education Week to show that 32 percent of participants said they work or had worked as teachers, and that 16 percent of teachers earned a certificate, twice the rate of the average participant (Education Week on Chuang & Ho, 2017). The underlying report is Chuang and Ho’s Year 4 report. Twice a bad rate is still 16 percent.

Here is the part I would actually act on. If the first two weeks decide it, then the first two weeks are where you should put your effort, not the middle. Clear the first two modules fast, even sloppily, and your odds change.

Four cards contrasting the advantages of online teacher professional development, including reach and no lost school days, against its losses in collegial support and accountability. — Online PD trades proximity for access. Both sides of that are real.

What does online PD do better than a workshop?

Access, mostly, and that is not a small thing — it is an equity issue.

Consider who actually benefits. The only chemistry teacher in a small high school has no department to collaborate with and no local workshop aimed at her. A teacher in a rural district may be a three-hour drive from the nearest content-specific institute, with no substitute available to cover the day. A teacher in a small school system has whatever the system can afford to bring in, which may be one consultant for all content areas. Online delivery is frequently the only way those teachers reach somebody who teaches what they teach.

Other real advantages:

Replay. You can rewatch the part you did not follow. In a workshop, the moment is gone.
No travel or sub coverage. Which means no lost instructional day for your students, and no cost to the building.
Scheduling around a teaching day. Asynchronous content can be done at 5:30 in the morning, which is when some of us are actually sharp.
Materials that stay. Transcripts, slides and readings remain available when you teach the unit again in February.
Reach across districts. A cohort drawn from eight states will challenge your assumptions more than one drawn from your own faculty.

For a small school running vertical teams or shared preps, online PD can be the thing that lets two teachers who share one subject work with somebody outside the building. The research on collective teacher efficacy is worth reading alongside this, because the mechanism is similar: the belief that your group can move outcomes is itself associated with results, and a cohort can supply that when a building cannot.

What does online PD do worse?

It strips out the two things that most reliably turn a course into changed practice: a colleague beside you and somebody who notices if you quit.

In a workshop, the person next to you is likely to teach in your building. You compare notes in the parking lot, you remind each other, and in October somebody asks whether you ever used that thing. Online cohorts can replicate some of that, but it takes deliberate design — small groups, assigned partners, scheduled check-ins — and most courses do not bother.

The accountability gap is worse. Nobody takes attendance in your living room. The Fishman comparison found online participants spending between 3 and 52 hours on identical material, which tells you how wide the effort range is when the clock is yours. And because completion is self-certified in many courses, it is easy to finish without implementing anything.

Two smaller losses worth naming. First, online PD rarely includes observation of your actual teaching, which is the part of coaching that does the work. Second, screen-based sessions make it easy to multitask, and a session you half-attend while entering grades is a session you did not take.

How do you make an asynchronous course actually stick?

This is the practical core of the article. Treat an asynchronous course like a unit you are teaching yourself: it needs a calendar, an audience and a product.

When	What you do	Why it matters
Before you start	Write one sentence: “By [date] I will have [artifact] ready for [class period].”	Gives the course a product. Without one, completion becomes the goal and nothing reaches students.
Before you start	Recruit one person — a colleague, a department partner, a teacher friend in another district — and tell them your deadline.	Replaces the accountability the format removed. One person who will ask is enough.
Week 1	Block two fixed hours on your calendar and finish modules 1 and 2, even roughly.	Jordan’s MOOC analysis found the first two weeks decide engagement. Front-load deliberately.
Each module	Keep a two-column log: left, what the module claims; right, what it would mean in your room.	Forces translation. Notes that only restate the video produce nothing on Monday.
Mid-course	Try one small thing with one class and write down what happened in three sentences.	Implementation during the course, not after it. After the course, the energy is gone.
Mid-course	Send your partner the artifact in progress and ask one specific question about it.	Creates the feedback the course did not provide.
Final week	Finish the artifact and schedule the class period you will use it in.	A date on a calendar is the difference between a plan and a folder.
Six weeks after	Look at student work from that lesson and decide: keep, fix or drop.	This is the only honest evaluation of whether the course was worth it.

None of that requires the course to cooperate. It is all on your side of the screen, which is the point: the format’s weaknesses are the ones you can personally patch.

Five-row graphic listing steps for completing and applying an asynchronous online professional development course, from naming an artifact to reviewing student work after six weeks. — Every one of these is on your side of the screen, which is why they work.

What should you ask before enrolling in an online course?

“Is this facilitated by a person, or is it a recorded library?”
“Are there live sessions, and what times are they held?” — then check that against your actual week, including anything you coach or sponsor.
“Is there a cohort, and how large are the working groups?”
“What do I submit, and who reads it?”
“How long do I keep access to the materials after the course ends?”
“What is the completion rate, and what counts as completion?”
“Does this include any look at my actual teaching — video, lesson artifacts, student work?”
“Which states have confirmed these hours for renewal, and who do I contact to verify?”

Question five matters more online than in person. Materials you can still reach in February, when you finally teach that unit, are worth considerably more than materials that vanish at the end of the term. Question eight you verify yourself with your state licensing office, not with the provider.

Is online PD worth it for a teacher paying out of pocket?

Sometimes, and the deciding factor is usually whether anyone on the other end will respond to your work. That is my opinion, and I will label it as such rather than dress it as a finding.

The reasoning is simple. Recorded content is abundant and much of it is free. What is scarce — and therefore what is actually worth money — is a person who will look at your unit, your assessment or your student work and tell you something true about it. If a paid online course does not include that, you are paying for curation and convenience. Those have value. They just do not have much value, and you should not pay a lot for them.

Before you spend anything, work through the criteria for judging whether any PD course is worth your time and money, which applies the same scoring to online and in-person options. And check the genuinely free offerings and what free actually costs first, because a surprising amount of serious content-focused material from federal agencies and museums is online, free and better than things people pay for.

Where online professional development for teachers actually fits

Use online PD for access to content and people you cannot otherwise reach, and build the accountability it leaves out before you start. That is the whole recommendation.

Concretely: pick a cohort over self-paced when the schedule allows, front-load the first two weeks, name an artifact and a class period, and recruit one person who will ask you about it in six weeks. If you do those four things, the delivery format mostly stops mattering, which is what the comparison studies have been saying for over a decade.

Do not let anyone tell you the evidence here is settled in either direction. It is not. After seven years of classroom experience I am comfortable saying the format is far less important than whether somebody is waiting for your work — and that if a course has nobody waiting, you should plan to be that person yourself.

Sources

Morina, F., Fütterer, T., Hübner, N., Zitzmann, S., & Fischer, C., “Effects of online teacher professional development on teacher-, classroom-, and student-level outcomes: A meta-analysis,” Computers & Education, 228 (2025), 105247. Source of the finding that online PD shows positive effects on teachers and students, larger for teachers, with the strongest effects where teachers participated together and simultaneously. Caveat: the paper is paywalled; the figures and quotations here come from an institutional summary published by the authors’ research network, which is a summary rather than the study. https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/research/core-research/lead-graduate-school-research-network/newsfullview/article/enable-online-training-for-teachers-it-works
Webb, D. C., Nickerson, H., & Bush, J. B., “A Comparative Analysis of Online and Face-to-Face Professional Development Models for CS Education,” SIGCSE ’17, March 2017. Source of the 75-teacher, 4,832-student comparison finding no negative student outcomes from online or blended PD. Caveat: computer science PD specifically, with a much smaller online sample (479 student respondents) than face-to-face (4,353). https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10095644
Heitin, L., “Benefits of Online, Face-to-Face Professional Development Similar, Study Finds,” Education Week, June 2013. Reporting on Barry Fishman and colleagues’ comparison of 48 hours of face-to-face workshops against self-paced online coursework for a high school environmental science curriculum, including the 3-to-52-hour range of online time. Caveat: this is press coverage of the study, not the Journal of Teacher Education paper itself. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/benefits-of-online-face-to-face-professional-development-similar-study-finds/2013/06
Jordan, K., “Massive open online course completion rates revisited: Assessment, length and attrition,” International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(3), 2015. Source of the 221-course sample, the 0.7 to 52.1 percent range, the 12.6 percent median and the finding that weeks one and two are decisive. Caveat: open MOOCs with general-public audiences, not teacher PD courses with employers attached. https://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2112/0
Chuang, I., & Ho, A., Four Years of Open Online Courses, Fall 2012-Summer 2016 (institutional report on edX courses), December 2016. Source of the scale figures: 290 courses, 4.5 million participants, 245,000 certificates. The teacher-specific figures (32 percent of participants, 16 percent certificate rate) are as reported by Education Week in January 2017. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2889436
Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D., & Hogan, D., “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence,” Review of Educational Research, 2018. Supports the claim that a responsive expert is the active ingredient, with 0.49 SD on instruction and 0.18 SD on achievement across 60 causal studies. Caveat: effects from large-scale programs are a fraction of those from small efficacy trials. https://annenberg.brown.edu/publications/effect-teacher-coaching-instruction-and-achievement-meta-analysis-causal-evidence
Yoon, K. S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W.-Y., Scarloss, B., & Shapley, K. L., Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement, REL Southwest, October 2007. Supports the duration floor referenced here: studies offering 5-14 total hours showed no statistically significant effects. Caveat: only nine of more than 1,300 studies met the evidence standards, and all nine were conducted with elementary teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED498548.pdf

Frequently Asked Questions

Is online PD taken less seriously than in-person training?

By some administrators, yes, though that is changing. What matters for renewal is whether your state recognizes the provider and the hours, which has nothing to do with delivery format in most states. If you are worried about how it will be perceived, the fix is to bring back something visible: a unit you redesigned, student work from a lesson you built in the course, or a short share-out at a department meeting. Perception follows evidence of use.

Can online PD really work for subjects that depend on hands-on practice?

Partly. The comparison studies that found equivalent outcomes used online conditions that included facilitator contact and, in at least one case, physical materials shipped to participants. A recorded video library will not teach you to run a lab or a shop safely. If the practice is physical, look for a hybrid: online content for the knowledge and a live or local component for the hands-on part. Be suspicious of any course that claims the physical piece is unnecessary.

How much time should I expect an online course to take?

More than the advertised hours, and the spread is wide. In one comparison study, participants working through identical self-paced material spent anywhere from 3 to 52 hours on it. Plan for the advertised contact hours plus implementation time, which is usually where the real cost sits. If a course claims a fixed small number with no implementation work attached, it is probably measuring seat time only, and seat time is not the part that changes your teaching.

What if the live sessions conflict with coaching, tutoring or my own kids?

Then pick the self-paced version and build the accountability back in deliberately. Cohorts show the strongest effects in the research, but a cohort you cannot attend is worse than self-paced work you actually finish. Replace the missing piece with one named person who knows your deadline and will ask about your artifact, plus a fixed two-hour block on your own calendar in week one. That costs nothing and addresses the format’s real weakness.

Does the low completion rate for online courses mean they do not work?

No, it means finishing is the hard part. The 12.6 percent median figure comes from open MOOCs with general public audiences and no employer attached, which is a very different setting from a paid or district-sponsored PD course. What transfers from that research is the timing finding: the first two weeks decide engagement. If you clear the opening modules quickly, you are in a different group than the one that produces those averages.

Is online PD a way for districts to save money on teacher learning?

It can be, and that is a fair thing to watch for. Online delivery removes travel, substitute coverage and lost instructional days, which are real savings and real benefits to students. The risk is that savings become the point and the expensive parts get cut first, which means coaching, feedback and follow-up. If a district moves PD online, the question worth asking is whether anyone is still paid to respond to teachers’ work. That is the part that carries the evidence.

Will an online course give me anything I can show students?

It should, and that is a reasonable test of whether it was worth taking. Students do not experience your course, they experience what came out of it: a clearer assignment, a better rubric, a project with a real audience, feedback that arrives faster. If you cannot point at something in your classroom six weeks after the course ends, the course gave you material rather than practice. Name the artifact before you start to avoid that outcome.

Are free online courses worse than paid ones?

Not reliably. A good deal of serious, content-specific material from federal agencies and museums is online at no cost, and some of it is better than commercial courses. What money usually buys is a person who responds to your work, extended access to materials, and documented hours for renewal. If a paid course offers none of those three things, price is not telling you anything about quality, and the free option is the better bet.

About Clay Shumate

October 7, 2026

Professional Development Courses for Teachers: How to Tell If One Is Worth Your Time

By Clay Shumate

Professional development courses for teachers are usually judged by what they hand out: a certificate, a transcript line, a count of clock hours. Judge them instead by what they change. A course worth your time is focused on the subject you actually teach, long enough to let you practice, built around something you can carry into class, and recognized by whoever renews your license.

Teachers get plenty of advice about which course to take and almost none about how to judge one. That gap matters, because the research on teacher learning is far less flattering than the brochures. Well-funded, well-attended, well-reviewed programs have repeatedly produced no measurable change in what teachers know or what students learn. What follows is the criteria, not the catalogue.

Key Takeaways

The features that predict good PD are known, but the evidence behind them is softer than it is usually presented. Content focus, active learning, modeling, coaching, feedback and sustained duration show up across reviews — and the most careful critiques say those reviews were built on weak inference.
Hours are a floor, not a guarantee. Short one-off sessions almost never move student outcomes, but a rigorous federal trial delivered 77 hours of middle school math PD and measured no impact on teacher knowledge or student achievement.
Ask what happens after the last session. Follow-up coaching has the strongest causal evidence of any PD format, and its effects shrink sharply when programs scale.
Apply the Monday test. If you cannot name the artifact you will walk out with — a task, a rubric, a sequence, a set of questions — the course is selling a feeling.
Check credit before you pay, not after. Renewal rules are set by your state, and a course can be excellent and still count for nothing.
The honest trade-off: the best-evidenced PD is expensive in the one resource teachers have least of. Depth costs hours, and nobody is giving you those hours back.

What makes professional development courses for teachers actually work?

The most cited answer is a list of seven features: content focus, active learning, collaboration, models and modeling, coaching and expert support, feedback and reflection, and sustained duration. That list comes from a 2017 review by Linda Darling-Hammond, Maria Hyler and Madelyn Gardner at the Learning Policy Institute, which examined 35 studies of PD programs with positive, statistically significant effects on student achievement (report, p. 2).

Read that sentence again, because the method is the catch. The review deliberately selected programs that had already worked, then described what they had in common. The authors are upfront that they “do not seek to draw conclusions about the efficacy of individual program components,” since real programs bundle several at once, and they note that six well-designed studies in their scan found no impact on student learning at all. So the seven features are a reasonable description of what effective programs look like. They are not proof that adding a feature will make your course effective.

That distinction is not academic nitpicking. In 2021, Sam Sims and Harry Fletcher-Wood published a critical review in School Effectiveness and School Improvement arguing that the whole international consensus on PD characteristics — sustained, collaborative, subject-specific, expert-supported, practice-based — rests on reviews with “inappropriate inclusion criteria” that “depend on an invalid inference method,” and is therefore “likely to be inaccurate” (critical review, open access). Their point is not that collaboration is bad. It is that nobody has established these features are the active ingredients.

So use the features as a screen, not a scorecard. A course that has all seven can still be a waste. A course that has three of them, aimed hard at a problem you actually have, can be the best thing you do this year.

Why does so much teacher PD fail anyway?

Because districts buy formats instead of outcomes, and almost nobody checks afterward. TNTP’s 2015 study The Mirage surveyed more than 10,000 teachers and 500 school leaders across three large districts and one mid-size charter network. It found those systems spent an average of nearly $18,000 per teacher per year on development, that teachers reported roughly 19 school days a year on it — about a tenth of the school year — and that nearly seven in ten teachers’ evaluation ratings stayed flat or declined over two to three years (executive summary).

That report got hit hard, and the criticism is worth knowing. Heather Hill, an education researcher who studies teacher learning, reviewed it for the National Education Policy Center in September 2015 and argued the cost figure was inflated by rolling in salary bumps for advanced degrees, that teacher evaluation ratings are an unreliable outcome measure, and that the study examined PD formats rather than content or quality. She concluded the descriptive findings deserve attention but the analytic conclusions were “overly broad and not supported by the study’s methods” (NEPC review).

Fair. But the more uncomfortable evidence comes from a randomized trial, not a survey. The Institute of Education Sciences funded a two-year study of a professional development program for seventh-grade math teachers focused on rational numbers. Treatment teachers received an average of 77 hours. After two years, the measured impact on total teacher knowledge was an effect size of 0.05 (p = 0.79), and the impact on student achievement in rational numbers was -0.01 (p = 0.94) (Garet et al., NCEE 2011-4024). Seventy-seven hours. Content-focused. Expert-delivered. Nothing.

I take that study seriously because it is middle school, it is the subject, and it is the design that can actually tell you something. It does not prove PD cannot work. It proves that hitting the recommended features is not enough, and that anyone promising you results from a course should be asked how they know.

Five-row graphic listing criteria for scoring a teacher professional development course: content focus, duration and spacing, practice with feedback, follow-up, and a usable artifact. — The five rows that carry the most weight when scoring a course.

Does course length matter?

Length is a floor you have to clear and nothing more. The most quoted number in this field comes from a 2007 review by Kwang Suk Yoon and colleagues for the Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest. They screened more than 1,300 studies; nine met What Works Clearinghouse evidence standards. Teachers in those nine received an average of 49 contact hours, ranging from 5 to 100. The three studies with the least PD — 5 to 14 hours total — showed no statistically significant effects (Yoon et al., 2007).

Two caveats that rarely travel with that statistic. First, 12 of the 20 measured effects across those nine studies were not statistically significant, and the authors call their own findings “only a preliminary marker.” Second, and this matters a great deal on a grades 6-12 site: all nine studies were conducted with elementary school teachers. The 14-hour threshold you see quoted in secondary school PD catalogs was never measured on secondary teachers.

Practically, treat it this way. A 90-minute webinar can legitimately teach you a technique. It will not change how you teach a unit. If a course is promising transformation in two hours, it is promising something no study in this literature has delivered.

Is the course about your subject or about teaching in general?

Content focus is the feature with the most consistent support, and it is the easiest one to check from the course description. A course on “student engagement” can be filled with anything. A course on how students misread primary sources, or where they get lost in proportional reasoning, or how to sequence a lab so the inquiry is real, has to commit to something.

Here is a fast test. Open the syllabus and count how many of the session titles could be swapped into any subject without editing. If most of them could, you are buying generic pedagogy. Generic pedagogy is not worthless — a new teacher drowning in behavior needs it, and that is a different problem than needing better questions about the Dust Bowl. Just know which one you are buying. If you need the behavior side, our walkthrough of building a classroom management plan from scratch is free and will cost you an afternoon instead of a semester.

Will you practice, or just listen?

Active learning in a PD course means you produce something and get a response to it, not that the facilitator asked you to turn and talk. The distinction is whether your work is the object of instruction.

Signals that the course involves real practice:

You bring your own unit, roster or assessment data into the sessions and leave with it changed.
Somebody with expertise reads your work and tells you what is wrong with it.
You watch a model — video, live, annotated transcript — of the practice being done well, not just described.
You rehearse the hard part before you do it with students.
There is an assignment between sessions that requires you to try it and report back.

Signals that it is a lecture wearing a lanyard: breakout rooms with no product, a shared slide deck as the main artifact, a facilitator who has never seen your classroom and does not ask about it, and a final “reflection” that nobody reads.

Four cards summarizing research findings on teacher professional development, including null results from a federal randomized trial and effect sizes from a coaching meta-analysis. — Four findings that complicate the usual pitch for teacher PD.

What happens after the course ends?

Follow-up is where the strongest causal evidence lives. Matthew Kraft, David Blazar and Dylan Hogan’s 2018 meta-analysis of 60 studies with causal designs found teacher coaching produced a pooled effect of 0.49 standard deviations on instruction and 0.18 on student achievement (Kraft, Blazar & Hogan, 2018).

Those are good numbers by education research standards. But the authors also report that average effects from effectiveness trials of larger programs are only a fraction of those found in efficacy trials of small ones. Coaching works best when it is small, close and well-run, which is exactly the version a mass-market online course cannot sell you.

So ask the blunt question: after the final session, does anything happen? Is there a cohort that still meets? A coach who will watch a lesson? A facilitator who will read a student work sample in November? If the honest answer is no, you are buying input only, and you will have to build the follow-up yourself. That is doable — a colleague who agrees to watch you teach one period and talk afterward is the cheapest coaching there is — but it only happens if you plan it before the course ends. A structured reflection habit is the minimum version.

Can you use it on Monday?

The Monday test: name the artifact you will walk out with and the class period you will use it in. If you cannot do both in one sentence, the course has not been designed for implementation.

An artifact is concrete. A driving question you will actually launch. A rubric with your standards in it. A set of ten exit-ticket prompts for the unit you teach in February. A revised lab sequence. A conference protocol. An artifact survives the drive home. Inspiration does not.

This is also the part of PD that most often fails on grounds of plain workload. A course that hands you a beautiful framework requiring twelve hours of redesign per unit has handed you a second job. When you evaluate a course, estimate the implementation cost, not just the seat time, and decide whether you are willing to pay it. If the answer is no, do not enroll and then feel guilty in July. Pick the smaller thing you will finish. Our writeup on formative assessment strategies that fit a normal class period exists because that is usually where the smaller thing lives.

Does it count for anything your state recognizes?

Check the credit question before you pay, because an excellent course can count for nothing. Nearly every state requires periodic license renewal tied to some form of continuing education, but the rules, the accepted providers, the hour-to-credit conversions and the documentation differ state by state. A 2018 New America report on relicensure found that most state systems are built around credit accumulation rather than demonstrated growth, so that “whether a teacher grows considerably while fulfilling her state’s renewal requirements or does not improve at all is of no consequence” as long as the credits clear (Rethinking Relicensure).

That cuts both ways, and you should be honest with yourself about which way you are using it. Sometimes you need hours and you need them cheap, and there is no shame in that. Sometimes you need to actually get better at something, and the hours are incidental. Trouble starts when you tell yourself you are doing the second thing while shopping for the first.

Three things to verify in writing, from your own state’s certification office rather than from the provider: whether the provider is on an approved list, how the course’s hours or graduate credits convert for renewal, and what documentation you must keep. Do not accept “most states accept this” as an answer.

Four-row graphic listing questions to email a professional development provider before enrolling, covering submitted work, follow-up, external evaluation and credit verification. — Send these four before you pay. The answers are the real syllabus.

A scoring checklist for any PD course

Run this before you register. Score each row 0, 1 or 2. It takes about ten minutes with the course description and one email to the provider.

Criterion	0 points	1 point	2 points
Content focus	Generic pedagogy, any subject	Subject-adjacent, examples from elsewhere	Your subject and grade band, specific topics named
Duration and spacing	Under 5 hours, single sitting	Roughly 15-30 hours, or spaced over weeks	40+ hours spread across a term or more
Active practice	Watch and discuss only	One assignment, no feedback	You submit work and an expert responds
Modeling	Practice described in slides	One demonstration video	Multiple annotated models, including ones that go wrong
Follow-up	Ends at the last session	Optional forum or office hours	Scheduled coaching, observation or cohort check-ins
Monday artifact	Nothing nameable	Templates you still have to fill	A finished, usable product built on your own materials
Implementation cost	Unclear or enormous	Heavy but defined	Stated honestly and sized to one unit
Evidence offered	Testimonials only	Internal satisfaction data	External evaluation or a named study, with limits acknowledged
Recognized credit	Provider is vague	Hours offered, conversion unverified	Confirmed by your state licensing office
Who is teaching it	No classroom background stated	Former teacher, different grade band	Practitioner or researcher in your grade band and subject

How to read the total. Sixteen to twenty: strong, enroll. Ten to fifteen: probably worth it if the gaps are ones you can fill yourself, which usually means follow-up. Below ten: you are buying hours. That can be a legitimate purchase. Just name it.

Questions to ask the provider before you pay

Email these. How a provider answers tells you more than the syllabus does, and a good one will not mind.

“How many contact hours, and across how many weeks?”
“What will I submit for feedback, who reads it, and what is their classroom background?”
“What finished materials will I leave with that use my own curriculum?”
“What happens in the two months after the course ends?”
“Has this course ever been evaluated by anyone outside your organization? May I see it?”
“What is the typical completion rate, and what counts as completion?”
“Which states have confirmed these hours for renewal, and who do I contact to verify?”
“What is the refund policy if the first two sessions are not what was described?”

Vague answers on questions four, five and six are the ones I would treat as disqualifying. Those are the three a provider with real results can answer in a paragraph.

The honest trade-off nobody puts in the brochure

The features with the best evidence behind them are all expensive in time, and time is the resource teachers have least of. There is no way around this and I am not going to pretend there is.

Look at the numbers together. The reviews point toward dozens of hours, spaced, with coaching attached. Teachers in the TNTP districts were already giving up around 19 school days a year to development they largely did not rate as a good use of time — two-thirds reported being satisfied with it, but only 40 percent called it a good use of time. The hours exist. They are mostly already spent, and spent badly, and you do not control that calendar.

Which leads to a position I will own as opinion rather than finding. If your district already consumes nineteen days of your year, your personal PD budget should go toward depth in one thing, not breadth across five. One course in your subject, long enough to matter, with a colleague doing it alongside you so somebody asks whether you tried it. Everything else should be free, short and immediately usable. On that point, what the research says about collective teacher efficacy is the most encouraging reading in this area: the belief that your faculty can move outcomes together is itself associated with results, and it is not something you buy.

If the budget is the binding constraint rather than the calendar, start with the genuinely free options and what free actually costs. If the constraint is geography or scheduling, the specific strengths and weaknesses of online delivery are worth reading before you commit to a platform.

How to choose professional development courses for teachers this year

Pick one problem you can name, then find the longest, most subject-specific course that addresses it and has something happening after the last session. Score it with the checklist above. Verify the credit question with your state before paying. Recruit one colleague so there is somebody to answer to in six weeks.

And set the bar where it belongs. Professional development courses for teachers are worth judging by one question in April: what do you do differently now, and can you point at it in a student’s work? If you cannot, the course was entertainment with paperwork. That is not a disaster. It is just information, and it should change what you buy next year. After seven years of classroom experience, the thing I am most confident about is that the sessions I remember are the ones that gave me something to carry out the door.

Sources

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M., Effective Teacher Professional Development, Learning Policy Institute, June 2017. Source of the seven features of effective PD. Caveat: the review deliberately selected 35 studies that already showed positive effects and states it does not draw conclusions about individual components. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Effective_Teacher_Professional_Development_REPORT.pdf
Yoon, K. S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W.-Y., Scarloss, B., & Shapley, K. L., Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement, REL Southwest / Institute of Education Sciences, October 2007. Source of the 49-hour average, the 21-percentile-point figure and the finding that 5-14 hours produced no significant effects. Caveat: only nine of more than 1,300 studies met the evidence standards, 12 of 20 effects were not statistically significant, and all nine studies were conducted with elementary teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED498548.pdf
Sims, S., & Fletcher-Wood, H., “Identifying the characteristics of effective teacher professional development: a critical review,” School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 32(1), 2021, pp. 47-63. Supports the argument that the consensus list of PD characteristics rests on weak inference. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10101575/
Garet, M. S., et al., Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study: Findings After the Second Year of Implementation, NCEE 2011-4024, May 2011. Source of the 77 hours delivered and the null effects on teacher knowledge (0.05, p = 0.79) and student achievement (-0.01, p = 0.94). Caveat: one program, one content area, six districts in year two. https://air.org/sites/default/files/downloads/report/IES_PD_Math_Exec_20114025_0.pdf
Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D., & Hogan, D., “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence,” Review of Educational Research, 2018. Source of the 60-study count and the 0.49 and 0.18 standard deviation effects. Caveat: the authors report that effects from larger-scale programs are only a fraction of those from small efficacy trials. https://annenberg.brown.edu/publications/effect-teacher-coaching-instruction-and-achievement-meta-analysis-causal-evidence
TNTP, The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development (executive summary), August 2015. Source of the $18,000 per teacher figure, the 19 school days, and the finding that nearly seven in ten teachers’ ratings were flat or declining. Caveat: three districts and one charter network, with an outcome measure (evaluation ratings) that Heather Hill’s NEPC review argues is unreliable for this purpose. https://tntp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TNTP_Mirage_Executive_Summary_2015.pdf
Hill, H. C., Review of The Mirage, National Education Policy Center, September 15, 2015. The critique of TNTP’s cost calculation, outcome measures and generalizability. https://www.nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/ttr_hill_tntp_mirage.pdf

Frequently Asked Questions

How many hours of professional development actually make a difference?

There is no reliable threshold, only a floor. The REL Southwest review found that studies offering 5 to 14 total hours showed no statistically significant effects, while the nine studies that met evidence standards averaged 49 contact hours. But all nine of those studies were conducted with elementary teachers, and a federal randomized trial delivered 77 hours of middle school math PD with no measurable impact. Treat anything under about 15 hours as skill-level training, and do not assume that clearing 40 hours guarantees anything.

Is a cheap course automatically worse than an expensive one?

No, and price carries almost no information here. Some of the most content-rich PD available is federally funded or museum-run and costs nothing, while some expensive courses are a slide deck and a certificate. What price does predict is whether anyone is paid to follow up with you, since coaching and feedback are labor and labor costs money. Score the course on the criteria, then ask whether the price is buying follow-up or just access to a recording.

My district chooses my PD. Does any of this help me?

Yes, in two ways. First, you can use the criteria to decide where to invest your own attention inside required sessions, which is a real choice even when attendance is not. Second, the questions in this article are the ones to bring to whoever schedules PD at your school. Asking what teachers will walk out with, and what happens in the two months after, is a reasonable question from a staff member and tends to improve the answer over time.

Does a course that counts for license renewal have to be good?

No. Most state renewal systems are built around accumulating approved credits rather than demonstrating growth, which means a course can clear your renewal requirement without changing your teaching. That is not an argument for ignoring credit. Hours are a real obligation with a real deadline. It is an argument for being clear with yourself about which purchase you are making, and for verifying the credit question with your own state licensing office rather than trusting a provider’s marketing.

What if I only have a few hours this semester?

Then buy depth in something small rather than breadth across a topic. A short, specific course on one technique you will use in a unit you already teach is a defensible use of three hours. A broad survey course is not, because surveys need the implementation time that short courses do not include. The other high-value option for a few hours is arranging to watch a colleague teach and talk afterward, which costs nothing and has better follow-up built into it than most paid courses.

How do I know whether a provider’s evidence claims are real?

Ask who evaluated the course and whether anyone outside the organization did it. Satisfaction surveys are not evidence of learning, and testimonials are not evidence of anything. A provider with real results can name an external evaluation, describe its design and tell you its limits without getting defensive. If the only evidence offered is enthusiasm from past participants, treat the course as unevaluated and price it accordingly.

Should students or families care which PD their teacher takes?

They will see the consequences rather than the course. Good PD tends to show up as clearer assignments, better feedback and assessments that match what was taught, which are the things students notice. The fairness question families sometimes raise is whether PD time pulls teachers out of the room. That is a scheduling decision made above the classroom, but it is a legitimate thing to ask a principal about, and depth in one area usually means fewer disruptions than scattered one-day sessions.

Is there any PD worth taking that is not about my subject?

Yes, in specific cases. Early-career teachers usually need classroom systems before they need subject-specific depth, because nothing content-focused survives a room that is not functioning. Teachers moving into a new role, grade band or program also need the general version first. The caution is that generic PD is the easiest kind to repeat forever, since it never gets hard enough to expose what you do not know. Once systems are stable, move toward content.

About Clay Shumate

October 7, 2026