Quality professional development is the process of gaining knowledge and understanding of new concepts, developing the skills needed to put those concepts into practice, and making those practices sustainable in the classroom in order to improve student performance.

Arkansas offers educators a tremendous range of professional development offerings—through cooperatives, centers, universities, state associations, online, and job-embedded approaches to learning.

Quality professional learning that is results-based and sustained can be found in a variety of places and delivered through a variety of methods. With such a range of offerings, it can be challenging to identify the "right" combination of programs and learning for a particular teacher, school or district.

The Traditional Approach

The traditional model of professional development provides learning through sessions in which educators spend large blocks of time engaged in a workshop or listening to a speaker. Such approaches can be effective for many goals, such as addressing the climate of an entire school or district, or learning a particular skill.

Job-Embedded Approaches

Increasingly, districts across Arkansas are setting aside a significant portion of professional development time for educators to pursue job-embedded professional learning.

• Job-embedded strategies such as professional learning communities and action research can build upon the learning that occurs in more traditional workshops, seminars or university classes.
• Often the job-embedded portion of professional development time is designed to be used in one- or two-hour blocks throughout the year, making up about half of the required hours, and allowing educators to adapt their approaches based on students' learning progress, challenges and needs.

The key to building a professional development plan that combines different offerings and approaches effectively lies in understanding and applying the elements of quality professional learning.

As educators, administrators and providers read the descriptions of these elements, they should consider their own experiences with professional development, and what they can do to move themselves and others in their learning communities toward ongoing quality professional development.

• Quality Professional Development Focuses on Results

With a formal requirement for educators to participate in 60 hours of professional development, there is a temptation to seek out whatever options will conveniently satisfy those requirements.

When professional development is not tied to outcomes in student achievement, it is often nothing more than activity-based time, time that may not have lasting or meaningful results.

By examining what progress needs to be made in student performance in schools and districts, and engaging educators in the planning, design and delivery of professional development tied to these gains, professional development opportunities will provide relevance for educators and produce results for schools.

A focus on results will also help identify the right combination of learning activities needed to form a coherent and sustained professional development plan for individual educators, as well as schools and districts.

• Quality Professional Development is Research-Based

Focusing on results-driven professional development requires a two-pronged approach.

First, it requires research on student-, school-, and when appropriate district- and state-level data to determine student and adult learning needs. This research can include examinations of student test scores, as well as interviews and surveys with teachers, administrators, students and other stakeholders. In turn, research findings help educators determine what types of professional development will be most beneficial, and provide baseline data against which results can be measured.

Second, quality professional development should be tied to methods of teaching and learning that research has shown to be effective.

The National Staff Development Council, for example, summarizes research on quality professional development for leaders at the school level in their publications What Works in the Elementary School, What Works in the Middle, and What Works in the High School.

By examining what works, instructional leaders can determine which practices are most effective in different contexts and what factors will contribute to improved educator and student learning.

Such research is a necessary starting point for developing sustainable and effective professional development plans.

• Quality Professional Development Fosters Individual and Team Learning

In order for professional development to take hold and result in increased student performance, it should include both individual and team, or organizational learning.

Though individuals are responsible for completing the required number of professional development hours each year, this does not mean that educators are on their own.

Team learning not only provides direct impact on a larger number of students, it also builds a support system to implement further educator-driven and job-embedded professional development.

While engaging in team learning, it is important to remember that individuals develop knowledge and skills at different rates. Individual learning also takes place while a team is working together on similar issues.

The Arkansas Department of Education recognizes a variety of team efforts as integral to professional development, including:

• Team analyses of student data
• Team work to develop academic improvement plans
• Study groups
• Grade level and vertical team planning to integrate subject areas
• Professional learning communities

For additional educator-driven and job-embedded professional development explanations, see Chapter 3 of A Tool Kit for Quality Professional Development in Arkansas.

• Quality Professional Development Informs Adult Learning through Student Learning

The focus of Arkansas' professional development standards is on improving student performance. This focus directly ties the work of educators to the performance of students.

The most direct way to improve student performance is to start with an assessment of how students learn and where students are in the learning process. This requires an examination of student work, and a review of data on student performance.

The added benefit of such assessments is that they not only help shape professional development programs, but can be professional development efforts in and of themselves.

Individuals and learning communities should strive to have a shared vision of what quality teaching and learning looks and feels like when it leads to improved performance results.

• Quality Professional Development Links Process with Results

If discussions of professional development begin with results, the process pieces more easily fall into place.

Professional development sessions should be designed to focus on what they will generate in terms of improved student learning, rather than on the skills that the session will develop in teachers. The acquisition of skills is a step along the path towards improved student achievement and enhanced learning, not the end goal in itself.

• Quality Professional Development Fosters Professional Learning And Growth

Too often, the term "professional development" is seen as a passive exercise in which educators receive information from some sort of expert, and are then expected to change their own practices based on the information that is presented.

Just as results-driven professional development focuses on student learning, the learning process of educators is at the center of professional learning.

A professional learning focus requires an examination of educators' cognitive processes and relationships, as well as the physical, social and emotional conditions that lead to the transformation of knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behaviors, rather than the activities associated with the development process itself.

More details on these characteristics of Quality Professional Development can be found, in Chapter 2 of A Tool Kit for Quality Professional Development in Arkansas.

For additional tools to help assess and refine  professional development plans, see Chapter 1, Tool 1.6 of A Tool Kit for Quality Professional Development in Arkansas.