Tag: Professional Growth

Professional Growth as a Teacher: Goals That Survive Past October

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

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

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

Teacher Professional Development: What Actually Changes Teaching

By Clay Shumate

Teacher professional development is any structured learning a teacher does to get better at the job — workshops, coaching, course work, collaborative planning, book studies, graduate hours. The research is clearer about what fails than what works. Sustained, content-focused, coached programs beat one-off sessions, but even the best-studied versions produce modest, uneven effects on students.

That is an uncomfortable thing to write on an education site. It would be easier to hand you seven features of effective PD and let you rearrange the faculty meeting calendar. But the honest version is more useful, because once you know where the evidence is thin you can stop blaming yourself for a session that changed nothing. It was probably never going to. What follows is what the studies found, where they disagree, and how to tell whether an hour is worth giving away.

Key Takeaways

Short PD does not show measurable student effects. In the federal review that applied What Works Clearinghouse standards, the three studies with the least contact time — 5 to 14 hours total — produced no statistically significant effect on student achievement.
Coaching is the best-evidenced delivery model, and it shrinks when scaled. A meta-analysis of 60 causal studies found large effects on instruction and smaller effects on achievement, with large programs producing only a fraction of the effects seen in small ones.
The famous “features of effective PD” lists are correlational. The reviews that produced them generally studied programs that already worked, so they cannot tell you which ingredient did the work.
PD can raise teacher knowledge and still not move students. A randomized federal study delivered 93 hours of math content PD, measurably improved teacher knowledge and explanations, and found no positive impact on student achievement.
Spending is not the constraint. One large district study estimated roughly $18,000 per teacher per year on development, with no common thread distinguishing the teachers who improved — though that study has real methodological critics.
You are allowed to evaluate the offer. Professional judgment includes judging professional learning. A teacher who can say why a session will not transfer is doing the job, not avoiding it.

What counts as teacher professional development?

Anything structured and intentional that is meant to improve a teacher’s practice counts, which is exactly why the category is so hard to study. A ninety-minute compliance briefing on a new attendance module and a two-year content-and-coaching partnership both get logged as professional development for educators. They share a line on a spreadsheet and almost nothing else.

The usual buckets are workshops and conferences, in-district training days, instructional coaching, professional learning communities and collaborative planning, lesson study, mentoring for new teachers, graduate course work, and self-directed reading or online modules. Staff development for teachers in most American districts leans heavily on the first two, because they are the cheapest way to reach every adult in a building on the same afternoon.

Keep that mess in mind whenever somebody says “PD does not work.” That claim is about as precise as “meetings do not work.” The question is which, under what conditions, and for how long.

Why does most professional development fail to change teaching?

Because the typical session ends at the moment the hard part begins. A presenter explains a practice, the room nods, everyone goes back to a classroom where the old routine is already running, and nobody ever returns to see whether the new thing was attempted. Explaining a practice and installing a practice are different jobs, and most PD is only funded for the first one.

There is a structural reason for this. Follow-up is expensive and invisible. A district can report that 400 teachers received training on formative assessment; it cannot easily report that 90 of them changed a lesson. So the metric collected is attendance, and the thing funded is whatever produces attendance.

TNTP’s 2015 report The Mirage put numbers on the scale of the investment. Surveying more than 10,000 teachers and 500 school leaders across three large districts and a mid-size charter network, it estimated roughly $18,000 per teacher per year on development and about 19 school days’ worth of time, and reported that evaluation ratings for close to 70 percent of teachers stayed flat or declined over two to three years, with no identifiable pattern separating the improvers (TNTP, 2015).

That report deserves its caveat, and it is a serious one. Heather Hill’s review for the National Education Policy Center argued that the study leaned on teacher evaluation ratings that are unreliable year to year, measured PD by format rather than by topic, fit or quality, and never established whether the development teachers received was even aimed at the things they scored poorly on. She called the sweeping conclusions “overly broad and not supported by the study’s methods” (Hill, NEPC, 2015). Both things can be true: the spending is enormous, and we do not have clean evidence about what it bought.

Four-row graphic comparing the strength of research evidence for coaching, sustained content professional development, feature checklists, and one-off sessions. — The evidence is uneven across professional development models, and the differences are worth knowing before you spend a day.

What does the research actually say about effective teacher professional development?

The most-cited synthesis identifies seven features, and its own authors say they cannot tell you which feature mattered. The Learning Policy Institute’s 2017 review of 35 methodologically rigorous studies found that effective programs tended to be content focused, to use active learning, to support collaboration, to model the practice being taught, to include coaching and expert support, to build in feedback and reflection, and to be sustained over time (Darling-Hammond, Hyler & Gardner, 2017).

Those seven features are the reason your district’s PD plan says “sustained, collaborative, job-embedded.” They are a reasonable starting point. But read the report’s own limitations section. Because the studies examined whole programs with many elements bundled together, the authors state plainly that they cannot draw conclusions about the efficacy of individual components, and that they were unable to comment on studies of PD that did not produce positive results.

That is not a technicality. It means the list describes programs that worked. It does not demonstrate that adding collaboration or duration to a weak program will make it work. Sims and Fletcher-Wood made this argument directly in a critical review in School Effectiveness and School Improvement, concluding that the influential feature lists rest on methodological weaknesses — chiefly inappropriate inclusion criteria — and that the field would do better to build on basic learning science than on those syntheses (Sims & Fletcher-Wood, 2021).

Mary Kennedy reached a related conclusion by a different route. Sorting 28 rigorous studies by the theory of action behind each program rather than by its design features, she found that many popular design features were not associated with program effectiveness, and that programs with similar content differed sharply in impact depending on how they supported teachers in enacting it (Kennedy, 2016).

How strong is the evidence for instructional coaching?

Coaching has the strongest causal evidence of any professional development model, and it still has a scale problem. Kraft, Blazar and Hogan reviewed 60 studies using causal designs and found pooled effects of 0.49 standard deviations on instructional practice and 0.18 standard deviations on student achievement (Kraft, Blazar & Hogan, 2018).

An effect of 0.49 on instruction is large for anything in education research. It is the one model where watching a teacher teach, talking about that lesson, and coming back next week reliably changes the lesson.

The caution is in the same paper. Average effects from effectiveness trials of larger programs were only a fraction of the effects found in efficacy trials of smaller programs. Small, carefully run, well-staffed coaching works. The district-wide rollout with one coach for 60 teachers is a different intervention wearing the same name. If your school is adding coaching, the ratio and the protected time are the program — not the job title. That gap between the careful study and the scaled rollout is not unique to coaching — in the evidence behind the six co-teaching models the headline effect size and the largest study since it differ by more than an order of magnitude.

Does more time automatically mean more learning?

No, but below a floor of about 14 contact hours the studies stop finding effects at all. The federal regional lab review by Yoon and colleagues screened more than 1,300 studies and found only nine that met What Works Clearinghouse evidence standards. Across those nine the average effect size was 0.54, and the three studies with the least professional development — 5 to 14 hours total — showed no statistically significant effects on student achievement (Yoon et al., REL 2007–033).

Two honest notes. Nine studies out of 1,300 is a thin base for a field this large, and the review is from 2007. And all nine were in elementary grades, so applying the 14-hour floor to a secondary department is an inference, not a finding. I still think it is the most useful number in the literature for a classroom teacher, because it reframes the question from “was the workshop good?” to “is there enough of this, over enough weeks, for anything to stick?”

And duration alone clearly is not sufficient, which brings us to the most sobering study in this whole area.

Four cards showing the chain from teacher learning to student outcomes, with notes on which links commonly fail. — Most professional development is funded for the first link and evaluated on the last one.

Can professional development raise teacher knowledge and still not move students?

Yes, and a randomized federal study showed exactly that. Garet and colleagues delivered an 80-hour summer math content workshop plus 13 hours of collaborative meetings and observation-based coaching to over 200 fourth-grade teachers across six districts in five states, randomly assigned. The PD improved teachers’ mathematical knowledge and the use and quality of their mathematical explanations in class. It did not have a positive impact on student achievement (Garet et al., NCEE 2016–4010).

That study was content focused, sustained, collaborative, modeled and coached — six of the seven features. The teachers learned. The students did not show it on the test within the study window.

Note the population: fourth-grade mathematics. This site is about grades 6–12, and I am not going to pretend a fourth-grade math result transfers cleanly to a tenth-grade history classroom. What does transfer is the logic of the chain. PD has to change teacher knowledge, then change instruction, then change what students do with their minds, then show up on a measure somebody chose. Every link can break, and the last two are the ones programs almost never plan for.

Why do the “features of effective PD” lists deserve skepticism?

Because a list of features is a description of winners, not a recipe. If you study only programs that raised achievement and then catalog what they had in common, you will find they were long, collaborative and content-focused — and you will have no idea how many long, collaborative, content-focused programs did nothing, because those were never in your sample.

It is why a district can faithfully implement every feature on the list — stretch the training across the year, put teachers in teams, anchor it in content — and get nothing. The features are present; the mechanism is absent. The Education Endowment Foundation’s 2021 systematic review of randomized trials, by Sims, Fletcher-Wood, O’Mara-Eves, Cottingham, Stansfield, Van Herwegen and Anders, reframed the field around mechanisms rather than surface features for exactly this reason (EEF, 2021). That review and its companion guidance are UK-based; the funding and staffing context is not ours, but the argument about mechanisms is.

The practical translation: stop asking whether a professional learning plan has the right shape and start asking what it is supposed to do to a teacher’s head and hands, and how anyone would know.

How should a teacher judge whether a professional development offer is worth their time?

Ask five questions before the first slide, and judge the answers against what the research found. You usually cannot decline required training, and I am not suggesting you try. But you can decide how much of your limited attention and your optional time to invest, and you can ask these out loud without being difficult about it.

Question to ask	Answer that predicts transfer	Warning sign
How many hours total, across how many weeks?	Multiple sessions spread over a term, totaling well past the 14-hour floor	“It’s a one-off, but it’s a really good one”
Who is coming back to see me try it?	A named person, a scheduled visit, a protected debrief	Nobody, or “your evaluator will look for it”
Will I see the practice done with students like mine?	Modeled or filmed in a comparable grade band and subject	Modeled with compliant volunteers or with elementary students
What am I expected to stop doing to make room for this?	Something named and removed	Nothing — it is added on top
What would count as evidence this worked, and who checks?	A student-work artifact or a specific observable change	An exit survey about satisfaction

If four of five answers land in the warning column, you are at an awareness session. Awareness sessions are not worthless — they can introduce a vocabulary and tell you something exists. Just do not expect your practice to move, and do not let anyone tell you later that you were trained.

Five-row checklist of questions a teacher can ask to judge whether a professional development offer is likely to change practice. — Ask these before the first slide; four warning-column answers means you are at an awareness session.

What should schools and districts stop doing?

Stop buying reach when you can only afford depth, and stop counting attendance as implementation. A principal with a fixed budget faces a real trade-off: one day of training for ninety teachers, or a year of coaching for twelve. The coaching evidence says the second is more likely to change instruction. The optics say the first is more equitable. That tension is genuine and I do not think it resolves cleanly.

What does resolve: a few defensible moves that cost little.

Protect the follow-up before you book the session. If the calendar cannot hold a return visit, the session is awareness-only — label it that way honestly.
Narrow the number of initiatives per year. Three well-supported changes beat nine announced ones, and teachers can tell the difference immediately.
Give choice where choice is possible. Required compliance training is required. Instructional learning does not have to be identical for a first-year teacher and a twenty-year veteran.
Use the people already in the building. Peer observation and lesson study cost release time rather than consultant fees, and build the collective capacity a one-day visitor cannot.
Report honestly. “Forty teachers trained” is an input. Say what changed in classrooms, or say you do not know yet.

For schools trying to build that kind of shared capacity, the research on what happens when a staff believes it can move students together is worth reading alongside this. It is also correlational, and I would hold it loosely for the same reasons.

What does professional learning look like when it is actually working?

It is specific, it is about your students, and somebody sees your actual teaching more than once. The common thread in the programs with real effects is not a format. It is proximity to the work.

In practice that looks like a small cycle: pick one narrow problem of practice, learn one technique that addresses it, try it in a named class on a named day, bring back a piece of student work or a short recording, and have one honest conversation about what happened. Then do it again. That cycle costs almost nothing in materials and a great deal in scheduling, which is why it is rare.

It also pairs with the kind of reflective habit a teacher can run alone. Structured reflection on your own practice is not a substitute for coaching — the evidence base is much weaker — but it is the part that does not require anyone else’s budget.

Where does PD fit with treating students as young adults?

How adults are trained tends to show up in how students are treated. This is the part where I am giving you my professional opinion rather than a research finding, so I will mark it as such.

Development that hands teachers a script and checks for compliance teaches a lesson about what learning is: do the steps, get the credit. Development that gives teachers a real problem, some room to solve it, and someone to think with teaches a different lesson. Teachers who are treated as capable adults with judgment are, in my experience and in my argument, more likely to extend the same thing to a sixteen-year-old. There is at least suggestive evidence in this direction — a study of 254 teachers of grades 1 through 12 found that teachers who perceived more pressure from above were less self-determined about teaching and in turn more controlling with students (Pelletier, Séguin-Lévesque & Legault, 2002). That is one correlational model from 2002, not proof, and I will not oversell it.

If you want the fuller version of that argument, I wrote it up separately in what it means to treat teaching as a profession. And if you want the narrower question of when a single session is worth running at all, that is the workshop format on its own terms.

What to do next with teacher professional development

Pick one thing, get enough hours behind it, and arrange for someone to come back. That is the whole recommendation, and it is supported about as well as anything in this literature is supported.

If you are a classroom teacher: choose one narrow problem this semester — openings, questioning, feedback turnaround, whatever is actually costing you — and spend your discretionary learning time there instead of spreading it across five interests. Ask a colleague to watch twice. If you are leading a department, protect the second visit before you book the first session. If you are a principal or a district leader, be willing to serve fewer teachers more deeply, and be honest in your reporting about what you did and did not measure.

And hold the evidence the way it deserves to be held. The strongest finding in teacher professional development is that short, unsupported sessions do not show up in student outcomes. The second strongest is that coaching helps and gets weaker as it scales. Everything past that is more contested than the slide decks suggest, and you are allowed to say so.

Sources

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 large-scale programs show only a fraction of small-program effects. Caveat: a meta-analysis pools programs of widely differing design, and the included studies span grade levels and subjects. https://annenberg.brown.edu/publications/effect-teacher-coaching-instruction-and-achievement-meta-analysis-causal-evidence
Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M., Effective Teacher Professional Development, Learning Policy Institute, June 2017. Source for the seven features of effective PD and for the review’s 35-study base. Caveat: the authors state they cannot draw conclusions about individual program components and could not comment on PD studies that did not yield positive results. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Effective_Teacher_Professional_Development_REPORT.pdf
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. Caveat: this is a critique of method, not evidence that sustained or collaborative PD fails. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10101575/
Kennedy, M. M., “How Does Professional Development Improve Teaching?” Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 945–980, 2016. Source for the finding that many popular design features are not associated with program effectiveness across 28 rigorous studies. Caveat: the classification by theory of action is the author’s own framework rather than a standard taxonomy. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654315626800
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 14-hour threshold finding, the nine qualifying studies out of more than 1,300 screened, and the average effect size of 0.54. Caveat: all nine qualifying studies were in elementary grades, so the hour threshold is an inference for grades 6–12, not a finding. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED498548.pdf
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 of 80 hours of summer content PD plus 13 hours of meetings and coaching that improved teacher knowledge and explanations 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
TNTP, The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development (executive summary), 2015, together with Hill, H. C., Review of The Mirage, National Education Policy Center, September 2015. Source for the roughly $18,000 per teacher per year estimate and the flat-or-declining ratings finding, and for the methodological critique of both. Caveat: Hill argues the study’s reliance on unstable evaluation ratings and format-only PD measures makes its sweeping conclusions unsupported. https://www.nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/ttr_hill_tntp_mirage.pdf

Frequently Asked Questions

Is all short professional development a waste of time?

No. A short session can introduce something, give a staff shared language, or deliver information that genuinely only needs to be delivered once. What the evidence does not support is expecting a short session to change classroom practice on its own. The federal review that applied What Works Clearinghouse standards found no statistically significant student effects in the studies with 5 to 14 total hours. So treat a one-off as awareness, not training, and judge it by whether you learned something true — not by whether your teaching changed.

If the evidence is this mixed, should districts cut professional development spending?

That is not the conclusion I would draw. The weak evidence is mostly about short, unsupported formats, and the strongest evidence — coaching — is the most expensive model. Cutting the budget would most likely cut the deep work first and leave the cheap compliance days standing. The more defensible move is reallocation: fewer initiatives, fewer teachers served at once, protected follow-up time, and honest reporting about what was measured. That is a harder political argument than a budget line, which is partly why it rarely happens.

Is coaching fair if only some teachers get it?

This is a real equity problem and it deserves a straight answer: no, not automatically. Coaching capacity is finite, so somebody decides who gets it, and those decisions can quietly track seniority, favor, or who is in trouble. If a school runs coaching, the selection rule should be written down and visible, the purpose should be stated as growth rather than remediation, and the rotation should eventually reach everyone. A coaching program nobody can explain the entry criteria for will be read as surveillance.

How does a teacher raise concerns about weak PD without sounding like a complainer?

Ask about logistics rather than value. “How many sessions is this across the semester?” and “Will anyone be coming by to see us try it?” are operational questions with clean answers, and they surface the transfer problem without putting the presenter on trial. If the answer is that there is no follow-up, you have not criticized anyone — you have learned what the session is for, and you can calibrate your effort honestly. Save the broader argument for whoever actually builds the calendar.

Does this apply to middle and high school the same way it applies to elementary?

Not identically, and the research base is honestly thinner for secondary. Several of the key studies — including all nine that met evidence standards in the 2007 federal review, and the randomized content-PD study with no achievement effect — were conducted in elementary grades. The structural logic still holds for grades 6 through 12: departmentalized teaching, 120 or more students per teacher, and a single planning period make follow-up harder to schedule, not easier. Treat the hour thresholds as orientation rather than as settled secondary findings.

What should a first-year teacher prioritize when everything is offered at once?

Classroom systems first, content pedagogy second, everything else later. A new teacher who stabilizes openings, transitions and response-to-misbehavior buys back the attention needed to learn anything else. Decline nothing that is required, but spend discretionary learning time narrowly, and find one colleague who will let you watch them and will watch you. That informal arrangement has more in common with the coaching evidence than most official programs do, and it costs nothing but nerve.

How can parents tell whether a school’s professional development is serious?

Ask what the school is working on this year and how many things are on the list. A school that can name two or three specific instructional priorities, say how teachers are being supported on them, and describe what they expect to see change is doing something real. A school that lists nine initiatives and reports how many staff attended training is reporting attendance. Neither answer tells you about any individual teacher, but the first indicates a leadership team that understands depth beats coverage.

Does teacher professional development affect how students are treated day to day?

There is suggestive evidence that it does, though I would call this the least settled claim in the article. A 2002 study of 254 teachers across grades 1 to 12 found that teachers who felt more pressure from above were less self-determined about their work and tended toward more controlling behavior with students. That is a correlational model, not proof. My own position is plainer: adults who are handed scripts and checked for compliance tend to pass that posture along, and adults trusted with judgment tend to extend it.

About Clay Shumate

October 7, 2026

Student Leadership Skills: 12 Abilities Schools Should Actually Develop

By Clay Shumate

Student leadership skills are the specific, teachable abilities a teenager uses to move a group forward — listening, explaining, planning, deciding, delegating, taking feedback, handling conflict, following through, and knowing what is not theirs to decide. They are not personality traits. They are behaviours you can name, practise and check, which is the only reason a school can teach them at all.

The twelve below are chosen because each one has an observable behaviour attached. If you cannot describe what it looks like from across the room, it does not belong on a skills list.

Key Takeaways

A skill is not a trait. “Confident,” “natural leader” and “takes initiative” cannot be taught or fairly assessed. “Restates the other person’s point before answering it” can.
School-based skill programs do move these outcomes, and implementation is the variable that decides it. A meta-analysis of 213 programs and 270,034 K–12 students found improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behaviour and academic performance — an 11-percentile-point achievement gain — with implementation problems moderating the result.
Do not grade these on a student’s self-rating. In the one cluster randomized trial of a school leadership program, teachers rated leaders markedly more effective while the leaders’ own self-ratings moved by exactly zero.
Feedback is not automatically good for you. The landmark meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes found feedback improved performance on average (d = 0.41) and made it worse in over a third of cases — which is why “receives feedback well” is a skill and not a courtesy.
Teaching is the cheapest practice ground you have. Peer tutoring shows moderate-to-large academic benefits across grades 1–12, and the student doing the explaining is practising four of these twelve skills at once.

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The 12 Student Leadership Skills Observation Sheet (2 pages)

Page 1 is a blank observation sheet carrying the observable behaviour for all twelve skills. Page 2 gives one way to practise each skill inside a lesson you were already going to run, and a check two adults could agree on.

Download the free PDF

Free. No email address required. Designed for grades 6–12. Browse every printable in Your Free Library.

Numbered three-step graphic titled Trait or Skill Three Tests: can you see it, can it be practised in ten minutes, and would two adults agree it happened — Three tests that keep traits off a skills list.

What Are Student Leadership Skills?

A student leadership skill is a repeatable behaviour that makes a group’s work go better, which a student can get visibly worse or better at. That last clause does the filtering.

Most published lists fail it. “Vision,” “charisma,” “integrity” and “confidence” are either traits, values, or descriptions of how a student comes across — none of them tells a fourteen-year-old what to do differently on Thursday, and none of them can be assessed without turning into a popularity judgement in a rubric costume.

Three tests for anything you want to put on a skills list:

Can you see it? Name the behaviour you would watch for. If the answer is “you just know,” cut it.
Can it be practised in ten minutes? Skills get better by repetition in low-stakes conditions, not by a workshop in September.
Would two different adults agree on whether it happened? If not, you cannot assess it fairly, and an unfair assessment of a personal quality is worse than no assessment at all.

These skills are the what. The roles students hold while practising them are the where — there are 25 of those in the companion guide to student leadership activities for grades 6–12, and the broader argument about what real responsibility requires is in the guide to giving teenagers authority that carries weight. This article stays on the abilities themselves.

Three-row graphic summarising research on student leadership skills: a meta-analysis of 213 school programs and 270,034 students showing an 11-percentile-point achievement gain, a randomized trial where teacher ratings rose d equals 0.39 while student self-ratings moved 0.00, and a feedback meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes where performance fell in over a third of cases — Three findings that shape how these skills get taught and checked.

Can Leadership Skills Actually Be Taught?

Yes, with two honest qualifications: the strongest evidence is for structured skill programs rather than leadership programs, and the quality of delivery moves the result more than the curriculum does.

The broadest evidence comes from Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor and Schellinger’s 2011 meta-analysis in Child Development — 213 school-based universal social and emotional learning programs covering 270,034 students from kindergarten through high school. Participants showed significantly improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behaviour and academic performance, “that reflected an 11-percentile-point gain in achievement.” Two details matter more than the headline. School staff ran the programs successfully, so this is not a specialist-only result. And the authors report that the use of four recommended skill-development practices and the presence of implementation problems moderated outcomes. Translation: a well-run ordinary program beats a badly run excellent one.

Leadership-specific evidence is thinner. The Learning to Lead cluster randomized controlled trial (Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2026) ran across 20 schools and 1,898 students. Teachers rated the trained student leaders significantly more effective afterwards (d = 0.39) and their classroom time on task rose seven percentage points. Those leaders were in grades 5 and 6, in Australia — it is not a secondary result, and the effect sizes do not transfer automatically. The design lesson does: the leaders spent twelve sessions actually teaching younger students, not sitting in leadership lessons.

That matches the peer-tutoring evidence, which is the best-evidenced vehicle for this grade band. Bowman-Perrott and colleagues (2013) synthesized 26 single-case studies covering 938 students in grades 1 through 12 and reported moderate-to-large academic benefits (TauU = 0.75), with secondary students at 0.74 slightly ahead of elementary at 0.69. Dosage made no difference — twelve focused minutes beat forty vague ones.

And service work carries a wider but weaker signal. Celio, Durlak and Dymnicki’s 2011 meta-analysis of 62 studies and 11,837 students found effects of 0.27 to 0.43 across attitudes, civic engagement, social skills and achievement — but 68% of that sample was college undergraduates and only 21% was in grades 6–12, with 87% of studies relying entirely on student self-report. Useful direction, soft numbers.

Four-row graphic grouping twelve student leadership skills: being in the room covering skills one to three, getting work done covering four to six, when it goes sideways covering seven to nine, and judgement covering ten to twelve — The twelve skills, grouped by what they are for.

The 12 Student Leadership Skills Schools Should Actually Develop

Four groups of three. Each row names the behaviour you would watch for, one way to practise it inside an ordinary lesson, and a check that two adults could agree on.

Being in the Room

Skill	What you would see	One way to practise it	A fair check
1. Listening to understand	Restates the other person’s point, in their terms, before answering it	Two-minute paired protocol: you may not reply until you have summarised and the other person agrees your summary is right	The partner confirms the summary was accurate
2. Explaining one thing clearly	Picks an entry point, checks for understanding, stops when the other person has it	Reteach one skill to two or three classmates after you have checked they hold it themselves	A short check on the students who were taught, not on the explainer
3. Giving usable feedback	Names one specific change, tied to the criteria, with the reason	Fixed critique protocol with a sentence frame and a cap of two items	The receiver can state what to change without asking a follow-up

Getting Work Done

Skill	What you would see	One way to practise it	A fair check
4. Planning backwards	Starts at the due date and works back to today, with dates attached	Build the team timeline on day one of a project, on paper, before any work starts	The written timeline against what actually happened
5. Deciding without complete information	Makes a call, states the reason, names what would change their mind	Forced-choice rounds: two defensible options, ninety seconds, one sentence of reasoning	Was a reason given, and was it about the task rather than about who suggested it
6. Delegating and asking for help	Hands off a piece of work with the standard attached, or asks a direct question early	Rule the group to a hard split — nobody may do more than their share — and require one question asked outside the group	Whether the work was actually distributed, and whether the question got asked before the deadline

Skill 6 is the one adults quietly model badly. I learned a review format I still use from another teacher on my hall, in my first year, because I asked — she had noticed I was short on engaging review games and I went and asked her how hers worked. Keeping your ears open helps. Asking questions helps more. That is a usable thing to say out loud to a fifteen-year-old who thinks a leader is supposed to already know.

When It Goes Sideways

Skill	What you would see	One way to practise it	A fair check
7. Taking feedback	Asks a clarifying question instead of defending or going silent	Receive-only drill: the receiver may ask questions but may not explain themselves for sixty seconds	Did the next draft change in the direction of the feedback
8. Navigating a disagreement	Separates the issue from the person; proposes something rather than repeating a position	Rehearsed scripts for the three disputes your room actually produces — workload, credit, and a missed deadline	Did the group keep working, and did an adult have to intervene
9. Following through and repairing	Says in advance that it will be late; names what is owed, to whom, by when	A standing one-line repair sentence any student can use, modelled by you first	The repair happened, on the date the student named

Skill 8 is worth money and worth caution in equal measure. School-based conflict resolution education is rated “promising” by the U.S. Office of Justice Programs, whose profile cites a meta-analysis of 36 studies in which participating students reported fewer antisocial behaviours (effect size 0.26), with fights falling from roughly 14% to 9.5%. Those are trained programs with adults running them. Teaching a student to de-escalate their own group’s argument about workload is a reasonable thing to do; handing a student somebody else’s serious conflict is not. If you want prewritten language to teach from, there are a hundred of them in the De-escalation Scripts set in my store.

Judgement

Skill	What you would see	One way to practise it	A fair check
10. Knowing what is not yours to decide	Stops and hands something to an adult instead of ruling on it	Sorting exercise: ten situations, three piles — mine, ours, not mine	Did the student escalate the ones that belonged to an adult
11. Running a short meeting	Keeps to an agenda, closes with who does what by when	Five-minute checkpoint with a fixed four-item agenda you supply	Meeting notes listing decisions and owners
12. Reflecting so it changes the next attempt	Names one thing to do differently and then actually does it	Two questions after any role: what worked, what you will change next time	Compare this reflection to the previous one — did the named change appear

Skill 10 carries more weight than its position suggests, and it is mostly your job rather than theirs. My position on this is blunt: if a student can wreck something badly enough to matter, that is poor planning and the adult was not paying attention. Teaching a teenager to recognise the edge of their own authority is part of the skill. Building a room where the edge is a long way from anything catastrophic is the other part, and it is the part you own. For skill 12, a two-question routine at the end of a role is enough — the mechanics of making that stick are the same ones in the guide to student self-assessment as a routine rather than an event, and the Daily Bell Ringers I sell are built around that kind of short prompt.

How Do You Assess a Leadership Skill Fairly?

Assess the behaviour, not the student, and never let a self-rating be the measure. Those two rules remove most of the ways this goes wrong.

The self-rating problem is not a hunch. In the Learning to Lead trial, teacher-rated leadership effectiveness rose significantly while the leaders’ own self-reported effectiveness moved by exactly nothing — d = 0.00, p = 0.999 — and their leadership self-efficacy did not reach significance either. The adults saw growth the students did not feel. If your rubric is a student rating themselves out of four, you are measuring how a teenager feels about themselves that week, which is a real thing but is not the skill.

Use self-report for one purpose only: as the student’s own evidence to discuss, next to yours. “You rated yourself a 2 on taking feedback. Here are the two drafts. Talk me through it.” That conversation is worth more than either rating.

The second trap is feedback itself. Kluger and DeNisi’s 1996 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin — 607 effect sizes across 23,663 observations — found feedback improved performance on average (d = 0.41) and made performance worse in over a third of cases. Their explanation is that effectiveness drops as attention moves away from the task and toward the self. For a skills rubric that is a direct instruction: say “the summary missed her second point” and not “you are not a good listener.” The first is a task. The second is an identity, and identity feedback is the kind that backfires.

Three practical rules that follow:

Assess one skill at a time. A twelve-row rubric read in one sitting becomes a general impression of the student with numbers attached.
Score the artifact, not the performance. A written timeline, a set of meeting notes, a partner’s confirmation that the summary was accurate. Those exist after the fact and two adults can read them the same way.
Keep it out of the course grade unless your standards actually include it and your district’s grading policy allows it. Most do not, and a leadership score smuggled into an academic grade is a fairness problem waiting for a parent email.
Sample rather than collect. With 150 students you cannot read an artifact from everyone every week. Read six a week, rotate, and tell students that is what you are doing.

Two more things, both about being open about it. Put the observable behaviours on a sheet students can read — a skill you are watching for in secret is a trap, not a lesson. And when a family asks, the honest answer is short: these are behaviours we practise and talk about, they are not in the course grade, and they do not replace the school’s discipline policy. Skill 9 is about repairing a missed deadline inside a group project. It is not an alternative to whatever your handbook already requires.

What This Looks Like Over a Semester

Do not try to teach twelve skills. Pick three.

A workable semester: skill 1 and skill 3 in the first six weeks, because listening and feedback make everything else cheaper; skill 4 when the first long project starts; skill 9 whenever the first deadline is missed, which it will be. Teach each one the way you would teach anything — model it, name it while you are doing it, give a short low-stakes rep, then use it for real.

Scope the rep, not the standard. The paired listening protocol is hard for a student who is new to the language, and the receive-only feedback drill is hard for a student who finds being looked at difficult. Written versions of both work — summarise in two sentences on paper, pass it back, let the partner mark it accurate or not. Same skill, same evidence, different load.

Two things to expect. The first reps will be stilted, because a sentence frame always is, and a fifteen-year-old restating somebody’s point out loud feels ridiculous for about a week. The second is that students will not report feeling more capable even when they are visibly better — that is the L2L finding again, and it is the main reason teachers abandon this work too early. Tell them plainly what you saw them do. Do not wait for them to look pleased about it.

If you want the specific roles to practise these in, every one of the twelve maps onto something in the 25 leadership roles — the facilitator job is skills 1 and 11, the reteach partner is 2 and 3, the project lead is 4, 6 and 9. And when a role goes badly, that is skill 9 territory, which is the same ground as holding a student accountable and giving them a way back.

What to Do Next

Pick three skills from the twelve. Write the observable behaviour for each on one sheet and put it where you plan, not where you display. Teach the first one inside a lesson you were already going to run — the paired listening protocol fits in two minutes of any discussion. Then collect one artifact per skill per student, and resist building a rubric until you have read a dozen of them.

The check that tells you it is working is not a score. It is whether a student uses the behaviour when you did not ask for it — the day somebody restates a classmate’s point before disagreeing with it, without a sentence frame on the board.

Before you go: grab the free 12 Student Leadership Skills Observation Sheet (2 pages) (PDF) — ElevateTheNorm.com branded, printable, no email required.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a leadership skill and a leadership trait?

A skill is a behaviour a student can get visibly better at; a trait is a description of the student. “Confident,” “charismatic” and “natural leader” cannot be taught on a Thursday and cannot be assessed without turning into a popularity judgement with a rubric around it. “Restates the other person’s point before answering it” can be taught, practised in two minutes, and checked by asking the partner whether the summary was accurate.

Can student leadership skills be graded?

They can be assessed; they usually should not be graded. Keep them out of the course grade unless your standards genuinely include them and your district’s grading policy allows it — a leadership score smuggled into an academic grade is a fairness problem waiting to happen. Assess one skill at a time, score the artifact rather than the performance, and tell students and families plainly what you are watching for.

Why should I not use a student self-rating?

Because the evidence says it will not track what you are trying to measure. In the only cluster randomized trial of a school leadership program, teacher-rated leadership effectiveness rose significantly while the students’ own self-ratings moved by exactly zero. Self-report still has a use — put the student’s rating next to your evidence and talk about the gap. That conversation is worth more than either number.

Which three skills should I start with?

Listening to understand, giving usable feedback, and planning backwards from a deadline. The first two make every group task cheaper to run, and the third is the one that prevents the week-before panic on a long project. Add following through and repairing when the first deadline gets missed, because it will, and the lesson lands best right then.

Do these skills work the same in middle school and high school?

The skills are identical; the scope changes. In middle school, keep each rep inside one class period and use sentence frames openly. In high school, the planning, delegating and meeting skills become realistic over a multi-week project, and the frames can come off the board. In both bands the first few repetitions feel stilted, and that is normal rather than a sign it is not working.

What about students who find the speaking protocols hard?

Scope the repetition, not the standard. Written versions of the listening and feedback drills carry the same skill and the same evidence: summarise in two sentences on paper, pass it back, let the partner mark it accurate or not. A student new to the language or uncomfortable being looked at can do the identical thinking with a different load.

Does any of this actually raise achievement?

Partly, and the honest version has caveats. A meta-analysis of 213 school-based social and emotional learning programs covering 270,034 students found improved skills, attitudes, behaviour and academic performance amounting to an 11-percentile-point achievement gain, with implementation problems moderating the result. Peer tutoring has solid grades 6–12 evidence. The leadership-specific trial measured leadership and time on task, not grades. Treat achievement as a plausible side effect of doing this well, not as the reason to do it.

Sources

Durlak, Joseph A., Roger P. Weissberg, Allison B. Dymnicki, Rebecca D. Taylor, and Kriston B. Schellinger. “The Impact of Enhancing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning: A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Universal Interventions.” Child Development, vol. 82, no. 1, 2011, pp. 405–432. 213 programs, 270,034 students from kindergarten through high school; improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behaviour and academic performance “that reflected an 11-percentile-point gain in achievement”; school staff ran the programs successfully; four recommended skill practices and the presence of implementation problems moderated outcomes. Abstract read via the U.S. Office of Justice Programs NCJRS record rather than the publisher, and cited accordingly; the record states no limitations. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/impact-enhancing-students-social-and-emotional-learning-meta
Kluger, Avraham N., and Angelo DeNisi. “The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 119, no. 2, 1996, pp. 254–284. 607 effect sizes, 23,663 observations. Feedback interventions improved performance on average (d = .41) but “over 1/3 of the FIs decreased performance,” with effectiveness falling as attention moved from the task toward the self. Not a school-only sample; it spans workplace and laboratory studies as well as education. https://cris.huji.ac.il/en/publications/the-effects-of-feedback-interventions-on-performance-a-historical/
Wade, Levi, Mark R. Beauchamp, Nicole Nathan, Jordan J. Smith, Angus A. Leahy, Ran Bao, Sarah G. Kennedy, Jed Boyer, Thierno M. O. Diallo, Sam Beacroft, and David R. Lubans. “Effects of a School-Based Leadership Program on Student Leaders and Their Peers: The Learning to Lead Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial.” Contemporary Educational Psychology, vol. 84, 2026, article 102444. 20 schools, 1,898 students. Teacher-rated leadership effectiveness d = 0.39; self-rated effectiveness d = 0.00 (p = 0.999); leadership self-efficacy not significant; on-task time +7 percentage points. Leaders were in grades 5–6 and peers in grades 3–4, in New South Wales, Australia — not a secondary-school result. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X26000020
Bowman-Perrott, Lisa, Heather Davis, Kimberly Vannest, Lauren Williams, Charles Greenwood, and Richard Parker. “Academic Benefits of Peer Tutoring: A Meta-Analytic Review of Single-Case Research.” School Psychology Review, vol. 42, no. 1, 2013, pp. 39–55. 26 studies, 938 students in grades 1–12; TauU = 0.75 overall; secondary 0.74 against elementary 0.69; no dosage effect above or below the 480-minute median. Single-case research designs, not group randomized trials. https://cdd.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2019/11/BowmanPerrott_SPRAcademicMeta.pdf
Celio, Christine I., Joseph Durlak, and Allison Dymnicki. “A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Service-Learning on Students.” Journal of Experiential Education, vol. 34, no. 2, 2011, pp. 164–181. 62 studies, 11,837 students; mean effects 0.27 to 0.43 across five outcomes. 68% of participants were college undergraduates, 16% high school and 5% middle school; only 31% of studies randomized and 87% relied entirely on student self-report. https://www.tamiu.edu/profcenter/documents/Meta-AnalysisoftheImpactofSLonStudentts_2011.pdf
“Practice Profile: School-Based Conflict Resolution Education.” CrimeSolutions, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Office of Justice Programs. Rated Promising; draws on Garrard and Lipsey’s 2007 meta-analysis of 36 studies, reporting an effect size of 0.26 on self-reported antisocial behaviour and fights falling from about 14% to 9.5%. Cited as a federal practice profile summarising a meta-analysis, not as the meta-analysis itself; the profile states no cautions on study quality or publication bias. https://crimesolutions.ojp.gov/ratedpractices/48

About Clay Shumate

October 6, 2026