Tag: secondary education

By Clay Shumate

Treating the teacher as a professional means trusting a trained person to exercise judgment in situations nobody can script in advance, and holding them accountable for the quality of that judgment rather than for compliance with a procedure. Teaching has the standards and the knowledge base for that status. What it often lacks is the discretion.

This is not a complaint about paperwork. It is an argument about what kind of work teaching is, and it has consequences in classrooms. A teacher who is handed a script and checked against it learns that correct process is the point. A teacher trusted with judgment learns that outcomes and students are the point. Those two teachers run very different rooms, and students can tell which one they are sitting in within a week.

Key Takeaways

• Professional status is about discretion, not prestige. The defining feature of a profession is the authority to decide what this situation requires, under standards the profession itself holds.
• Teaching already has the standards. The InTASC core standards and the National Board’s five core propositions both make judgment and self-evaluation explicit professional obligations.
• Teachers report far less control than the standards assume. In federal survey data, about a quarter of teachers reported a great deal of control over textbooks and instructional materials, and under 30 percent over content and topics.
• The comparison to medicine holds in some places and breaks in others. Teachers do diagnostic work under uncertainty; they do not control entry to the field, caseload, or the conditions of practice.
• Pressure travels downhill. One study of 254 teachers across grades 1–12 found that teachers who felt more pressure from above became less self-determined and more controlling with students.
• Trust is the connection. This is my professional opinion rather than a finding: teachers trusted with judgment are the ones most likely to extend judgment to a sixteen-year-old.

What does it mean to talk about the teacher as a professional?

It means three things together: a body of specialized knowledge, standards the field holds itself to, and the discretion to apply both to a particular case. Drop the third and you do not have a profession. You have a trained workforce following instructions, which is a respectable thing to be and a different thing.

The word gets used loosely. “Be professional” is often said to teachers when what is meant is “dress appropriately,” “do not argue in front of parents,” or “submit the form on time.” Those are workplace conduct expectations. They apply to any job. They are not what makes a profession, and conflating the two is how a staff ends up with the obligations of professional status and none of the authority.

The real test is simpler than any definition: when a situation arises that the manual does not cover, who decides? If the answer is the person in the room with the relevant training, that is a profession operating. If the answer is that someone must be called, the job is being treated as something else.

Where does the comparison to medicine and law actually hold?

It holds on the structure of the work: diagnosis under uncertainty, with incomplete information, on a case that will not wait. A teacher looking at a student who has stopped turning in work is doing diagnostic reasoning. Is this a skill gap, a comprehension gap, a motivation problem, a home situation, a scheduling conflict, a conflict with another student, or a reasonable protest against a bad assignment? The correct response differs completely depending on the answer, and no policy document distinguishes among them.

It also holds on the knowledge base. Content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, adolescent development, assessment design, reading in the discipline — that is specialized expertise that takes years to build and that a smart outsider cannot improvise.

And it holds in the formal standards, which read like professional standards rather than job descriptions. The InTASC Model Core Teaching Standards, published by the Council of Chief State School Officers, make judgment explicit. Standard 9 states that the teacher “engages in ongoing professional learning and uses evidence to continually evaluate his/her practice, particularly the effects of his/her choices and actions on others,” and adapts practice to meet the needs of each learner (CCSSO, InTASC 1.0, 2013). That sentence assumes a teacher has choices to evaluate.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is even more direct. Its third and fourth core propositions are that teachers “are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning” and that teachers “think systematically about their practice and learn from experience” (NBPTS, five core propositions, originally released 1989 and updated 2016). Responsibility and systematic thinking are both discretion words.

Where does the comparison break down?

On control of the conditions of practice, which is most of what distinguishes a profession from a credentialed job. I would be doing you a disservice if I pushed the doctor analogy too hard, because the places it fails are the places teachers feel the problem.

• Caseload. A physician’s panel size is a contested professional issue. A secondary teacher’s roster is handed down, and 150 students is normal.
• Entry to the field. Medicine and law control licensure through their own bodies. Teacher certification is set by states and routinely altered by legislatures, including emergency routes created during shortages.
• Tools of practice. A surgeon is not told which instruments to use by a purchasing committee. A teacher often is.
• Time to think. Professional judgment requires time for it. One planning period against six classes is not a schedule built for deliberation.
• Who evaluates. Peer review by qualified colleagues is central to the other professions. Teacher evaluation is usually done by an administrator who may not share the subject.

There is also a real counterargument to the whole analogy, and it deserves airing rather than dismissing. Public schools serve every child by law, funded by taxpayers, under elected boards. That creates legitimate public claims on what gets taught that do not exist in private medical practice. A teacher does not get to decide the standards any more than a doctor gets to invent a treatment protocol. The question is not whether constraints are legitimate. It is where the constraint should stop and the judgment should begin.

How much control do teachers actually report having?

Much less than the standards assume, and the gap is largest exactly where expertise matters most. Drawing on 2015–16 National Teacher and Principal Survey data, the Economic Policy Institute reported the share of teachers who said they had a great deal of control over each area of their planning and teaching: 68.3 percent for determining the amount of homework, 61.2 percent for evaluating and grading students, 42.3 percent for disciplining students, 28.7 percent for selecting content, topics and skills, and 25.5 percent for selecting textbooks and instructional materials (García & Weiss, EPI, May 2019).

Look at the shape of that. Teachers control homework volume and grading — the administrative end of the work. Fewer than three in ten report real control over what is taught. The report also notes that larger shares of teachers who quit reported having little influence over school policy or over what they teach in class, though that is an association in survey data rather than a demonstrated cause of attrition.

A fair reading cuts both ways. Shared curriculum decisions are not inherently an insult; a department choosing materials together is a professional act even when an individual teacher is outvoted. “A great deal of control” is also a high bar, and the survey does not distinguish a collaborative adoption from a mandate. But a quarter is a low number, and it is the number teachers are reacting to when they say they do not feel trusted.

Is a scripted curriculum incompatible with professional status?

A strong common curriculum is not the problem. A script that forecloses in-the-moment judgment is. These get conflated constantly, usually by people arguing for one extreme or the other.

Good shared materials are a professional asset. They save planning time nobody has, they make coherence across sections possible, and they give a new teacher something better than whatever they can build alone at 11 p.m. Arguing against common curriculum in the name of autonomy usually means arguing for every teacher to reinvent the course from scratch, which is neither efficient nor good for students who change sections.

The problem is a different thing: materials delivered as a compliance instrument, with pacing enforced to the slide and no latitude to respond to what the room is doing. A 2025 report from the National Education Union surveyed 1,655 teachers and interviewed 40 more across England and Wales on standardized curricula. It found that when such materials function as rigid scripts — specifying in detail how tasks are to be performed — teachers describe a loss of professional expertise, and that more than a third of primary teachers using them reported little or no influence over the content of individual lessons (NEU, 2025). That is a union-published study in a different country’s school system, and the primary-school figure is not about our grade band — take it as corroborating testimony rather than as American evidence.

The useful distinction is between a floor and a ceiling. A curriculum that says “every student will write an evidence-based argument this unit” is a floor. A curriculum that says “on day four you will be on slide eight” is a ceiling, and a ceiling is where judgment goes to die.

What is the difference between a guardrail and a script?

A guardrail specifies the outcome and the non-negotiables; a script specifies the moves. Most arguments about teacher autonomy would get shorter if people named which of the two they were defending.

Here is how I would sort the common decisions. This is my professional judgment, offered as a starting point for a department conversation rather than as research.

If your school can agree on a table like that one and write it down, most of the autonomy argument resolves. The fights are rarely about whether standards should exist. They are about whether row four and row five belong to the teacher, and when a district quietly takes those rows, it is taking the profession with them. Related to row eight: whether a school lets teachers judge small misbehavior inside a shared framework shapes nearly everything about how consequences actually land.

Why does compliance culture produce worse teaching?

Because the thing that makes teaching work is responsiveness, and compliance systems reward predictability instead. Mary Kennedy’s review of 28 rigorous studies of professional development found that many of the design features we assume matter were not associated with effectiveness, while the way programs supported teachers in actually enacting a practice varied sharply in impact (Kennedy, 2016). Enactment is judgment work. It is the part a specification cannot carry.

There is also evidence that pressure on teachers changes how they treat students. Pelletier, Séguin-Lévesque and Legault studied 254 teachers of students in grades 1 through 12 and found that the more teachers perceived pressure from above — curriculum compliance, performance standards, colleagues — the less self-determined they were about teaching, and that lower self-determination predicted a more controlling style with students (Pelletier, Séguin-Lévesque & Legault, 2002). That is a structural equation model on self-report data from 2002, not a randomized trial, and it spans elementary through high school rather than isolating secondary teachers. I will not claim more than it shows.

What it shows is still worth knowing: controlling conditions correlate with controlling teaching. That is not a surprising result, but it is the mechanism behind a complaint teachers make constantly and rarely get believed about.

How does trusting teachers connect to trusting students?

This is the center of my argument, and I am labeling it as argument rather than evidence. I have seven years of classroom experience in the public schools of West Alabama, and the pattern I would defend is this: the posture a school takes toward its teachers is the posture those teachers tend to take toward their students.

Consider what the two stances actually model. A school that assumes teachers will cut corners unless monitored builds monitoring. The teacher who lives inside that assumption has been taught, daily, that trust is something you earn by compliance and that verification is what care looks like. It takes real deliberate effort not to pass that along — to turn around and hand a fifteen-year-old a genuine choice, accept that some of them will handle it badly, and treat the mishandling as information rather than as proof the choice was a mistake.

The reverse holds too. A teacher who is trusted to decide how to teach Tuesday has direct personal experience of being treated as capable before they had proven it in that instance. That experience is what makes it possible to extend the same thing to students — to build in real decisions students actually get to make rather than a menu with one correct answer, and to treat respect as something offered first rather than withheld pending good behavior.

I am not claiming research proves this chain. The Pelletier study is suggestive on one link of it and that is all. But if you are going to ask teachers to treat teenagers as developing young adults capable of judgment, it is worth noticing whether anyone treats the teachers that way.

What can a teacher do when autonomy is limited?

Work the discretion you do have, and document the judgment you are exercising. Most teachers have more latitude in the small moves than in the large ones, and the small moves are where students live.

• Own the parts nobody has specified. Even a tightly paced curriculum rarely dictates how you open class, how you respond to a wrong answer, or what you say to a student who is behind.
• Make your reasoning visible. “I slowed the unit by two days because the exit tickets showed half the class could not do the inference step” is a professional sentence. It converts a pacing deviation into a documented judgment.
• Use the collective route. Individual deviation gets read as noncompliance; a department proposal gets read as professional input. The data says curriculum decisions are mostly made above the individual teacher, so work at the level where they are made.
• Keep the evidence. Student work samples are the strongest argument any teacher has. They are also what Standard 9 asks you to be using anyway.
• Build the reflective habit. Systematic thinking about practice is literally the fourth core proposition. Keeping a real record of what you tried and what happened is both the professional obligation and your best protection.

What should school and district leaders do?

Specify outcomes and non-negotiables tightly; leave the moves to the people in the rooms. This costs nothing and is harder than it sounds, because it requires tolerating variation that looks like inconsistency from a hallway.

Three concrete moves. First, write down which decisions belong at which level and publish it, so teachers are not guessing where the line is this month. Second, evaluate reasoning rather than conformity — ask a teacher why they did what they did, and treat a good answer as a good answer even when it departs from the plan. Third, give judgment somewhere to live: common planning time, peer observation that is not evaluation, and fewer simultaneous initiatives so there is room to think about any of them. For how professional learning intersects with this, see what the evidence says about developing teachers, and for the narrower case of one-off sessions, the workshop format on its own terms.

What treating the teacher as a professional asks of us

It asks for discretion matched to accountability, and it asks for it in both directions. Treating the teacher as a professional is not a request for less oversight. It is a request for oversight of the right thing: the quality of the judgment, demonstrated in student work and in reasoning a teacher can defend, rather than conformity to a sequence somebody wrote in July.

If you teach, start by naming the discretion you already have and using it deliberately, and by making your reasoning explicit enough that it reads as judgment rather than drift. If you lead, publish the decision table for your building and then actually hold the line on the rows you assigned to teachers. And if you are weighing a new mandate, ask what it takes off teachers’ plates, not just what it adds — because every script you hand down arrives in a room where somebody is deciding whether to hand a teenager a real choice.

Sources

1. Council of Chief State School Officers, InTASC Model Core Teaching Standards and Learning Progressions for Teachers 1.0, April 2013. Source for the ten core teaching standards and the quoted text of Standard 9 on using evidence to continually evaluate one’s own practice and adapt it to each learner. Caveat: these are model standards voluntarily adopted and adapted by states; they describe aspiration, not what any given district permits in practice. https://www.ksde.gov/Portals/0/TLA/Educator%20Eval/InTASC%20Standards%20-%202013.pdf
2. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Five Core Propositions, originally released 1989 and updated 2016. Source for the five propositions, including that teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning and think systematically about their practice. Caveat: this is the position of a certifying body with an interest in defining teaching as a profession, not an independent research finding. https://nbpts.org/five-core-propositions
3. García, E., & Weiss, E., Challenging working environments (‘school climates’), especially in high-poverty schools, play a role in the teacher shortage, Economic Policy Institute, May 30, 2019. Source for the teacher-reported control figures — 25.5 percent for textbooks and instructional materials, 28.7 percent for content and topics, 42.3 percent for discipline, 61.2 percent for grading, 68.3 percent for homework — drawn from 2015–16 National Teacher and Principal Survey data. Caveat: these are teacher self-reports of “a great deal of control,” a high bar that does not distinguish collaborative department decisions from top-down mandates, and the link to attrition is an association, not a demonstrated cause. https://files.epi.org/pdf/162910.pdf
4. Pelletier, L. G., Séguin-Lévesque, C., & Legault, L., “Pressure from above and pressure from below as determinants of teachers’ motivation and teaching behaviors,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(1), 186, 2002. Source for the finding that teachers perceiving more pressure from above were less self-determined about teaching and in turn more controlling with students. Caveat: a structural equation model on self-report data from 254 teachers spanning grades 1–12, from 2002; it demonstrates association, not causation, and does not isolate secondary teachers. https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/articles-chhs/224
5. National Education Union, Are you on slide 8 yet? The impact of standardised curricula on teacher professionalism, March 25, 2025. Source for teachers’ accounts of de-skilling under rigidly scripted curricula and for the finding that over a third of primary teachers using such materials reported little or no influence over individual lesson content; based on 1,655 survey responses and 40 interviews. Caveat: a union-published study of primary and secondary schools in England and Wales; the cited figure is for primary teachers and the policy context is not the American one. https://neu.org.uk/latest/library/are-you-slide-8-yet
6. Kennedy, M. M., “How Does Professional Development Improve Teaching?” Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 945–980, 2016. Source for the finding across 28 rigorous studies that many popular design features are not associated with effectiveness while the support for enactment varies sharply in impact — used here as evidence that judgment in application, rather than specification, carries the weight. Caveat: this is a review of professional development programs, not a direct study of teacher autonomy. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0034654315626800

Frequently Asked Questions

By Clay Shumate

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

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

Key Takeaways

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

What is professional growth as a teacher?

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

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

Why do most teacher goals die in October?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

5. 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.
6. Shorter cycle. No major assignment goes more than five school days without returned feedback. Evidence: a dated log of returns. Check: weekly, two minutes.
7. 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

8. 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.
9. 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

10. 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.

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

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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

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