What Actually Makes Teacher Professional Development Work?

That gap — between good intentions and actual impact — is what the research on professional development has been trying to close for decades. The picture it has assembled is reasonably clear. As Borko (2004) put it, too much professional development remains “fragmented, intellectually superficial, and does not take into account what we know about how teachers learn.” The same critique appears, with similar findings, in medical and health professions higher education: a systematic review of 111 faculty development studies by Steinert and colleagues (2016) identifies the same structural shortcomings — and the same structural solutions — that the broader literature has long pointed to. The principles converge across sectors. The practice, in most institutions, has not caught up.

The stakes of this gap are not trivial. A rigorous 2025 meta-analysis by Visscher and colleagues, drawing on 128 high-quality experimental studies, found that professional development does, on average, produce a meaningful positive effect on student achievement. But the variability was striking: effects ranged from actively harmful to highly beneficial. Around 15% of programmes had no effect or made things worse. The average is real; it is not a guarantee. Which raises the question: what separates the programmes that work from the ones that do not?

The One-Day Workshop Problem

The most persistent myth in academic professional development is that a workshop can change practice. It cannot — at least, not on its own.

A landmark national study by Garet and colleagues (2001), drawing on over a thousand teachers, found that what matters is not the format but the structure over time. Specifically, activities that are spread across weeks or months consistently produce deeper learning than equivalent content compressed into a single day or intensive block. The reason is straightforward: spread-out engagement affords lecturers the chance to try something in the lecture hall or seminar room, bring that experience back into discussion, adjust, and try again. That cycle — experiment, reflect, return — is where real learning lives. A block of hours cannot produce it, no matter how intensive.

This already argues against the intensive day or weekend retreat. But the 2025 Visscher meta-analysis pushes the point further. Its inclusion criteria required all 128 studies to run for at least twelve weeks — meaning every programme it reviewed was already extended over time rather than compressed into a block. And yet, even within that sample of longitudinal programmes, those that devoted more hours to professional development were not more effective. Total hours was not a statistically significant predictor of student outcomes. The implication is sharper than a simple case against one-day workshops: it is not enough to spread development over time if the time is not well used. What predicted outcomes was the quality of the programme’s design — specifically, whether it incorporated key principles for learning complex skills. The spread creates the conditions for real learning to happen; what fills that time is what determines whether it does.

The higher education evidence echoes this. Steinert et al. (2016) found that longitudinal programmes — those extending over months or years — consistently produced outcomes that went beyond teaching effectiveness: new leadership roles, curriculum innovation, and the development of genuine professional communities. Short courses and one-time workshops, by contrast, rarely produced observed changes in behaviour and almost never produced organisational change. The value of longitudinal formats lies not in the hours they accumulate but in the structure they create: the repeated cycle of learning, attempting, and returning.

Substance Over Process

A second finding challenges the instinct to focus professional development on generic pedagogy — the kind of session that introduces active learning techniques or assessment strategies in the abstract, disconnected from any particular discipline.

Garet et al. (2001) found that professional development which deepens teachers’ engagement with their own subject matter — how students think about that content, where they get stuck, what misconceptions arise — has more impact than development focused on general teaching skills alone. This is not an argument against pedagogy. It is a more precise argument: effective professional development integrates content and pedagogy. It asks not just how do we teach but how do students think about this specific content?

There is a theoretical reason this matters, not just an empirical one. Amundsen and Wilson (2012), in a conceptual review of 137 higher education faculty development studies, identified a distinct cluster of practice they called the disciplinary focus: initiatives grounded in the observation that the structure of knowledge varies between disciplines, and that academics identify most deeply with their disciplinary culture, not with generic teaching technique. Development anchored in that disciplinary identity — using scholarly processes to probe pedagogical assumptions from within the field — produced richer and more durable change than skill-focused interventions imposed from outside it.

It is worth noting that Visscher et al. (2025) did not find statistically significant differences between programmes with different content goals: whether professional development targeted pedagogical content knowledge, curriculum implementation, or classroom management skills, the average effects on student outcomes were broadly similar. This suggests it may matter less what the substantive focus is than how the development is designed and structured. The discipline-specificity argument retains intuitive appeal and theoretical support, but the field’s assumption that content-knowledge focus is the decisive variable appears weaker than often claimed.

In higher education, the structural problem remains: most academic development units are not disciplinary experts, making content-neutral sessions easy to plan and scale. The evidence suggests that discipline-based peer learning — colleagues working together on shared teaching challenges within their field — is worth the additional effort to organise.

Active Learning Is Not Optional

Reading a framework document about inquiry-based learning is not the same as experiencing inquiry as a learner. Yet much professional development still asks lecturers to receive information passively rather than engage with it actively.

Garet et al. (2001) found strong positive effects when professional development offered meaningful opportunities for active participation: observing expert teaching and being observed yourself with structured feedback, reviewing student work together, planning a session collaboratively, presenting to peers, leading a discussion. These are not extras — they are core.

Particularly powerful is the use of what Borko (2004) calls records of practice: video clips of real lectures or seminars, annotated student work, lesson plans with honest reflections. When lecturers examine real evidence of teaching and learning — not sanitised best-practice examples but actual classroom moments, including the awkward ones — the conversation becomes richer, the learning more concrete, and the changes more likely to stick. A ten-minute clip of a colleague’s seminar, watched and discussed together, often does more than an entire afternoon of input from an external speaker.

A recent Australian study of higher education academics (Patfield et al., 2022) reinforces this from a different angle: even when a workshop was the starting point, the academics who went further into peer observation and structured community of practice processes reported substantially deeper changes — not just in their understanding of teaching, but in their capacity to analyse and improve it. The workshop introduced a framework; the active engagement with real teaching situations is what made it stick.

The Design Principles That Predict Impact

Perhaps the most actionable finding from recent research is that specific learning-design principles, applied in combination, predict whether professional development actually improves what happens in classrooms.

Visscher et al. (2025) identified four such principles, drawn from learning theory, and tested them across their full dataset. The four are: clear performance standards (explicit definitions of what good teaching looks like, so that teachers can compare and self-correct); teacher self-regulation (actively supporting teachers to monitor and direct their own learning, rather than treating them as passive recipients); in-classroom coaching (structured feedback on how well teachers are implementing new practices in their actual teaching); and teacher cooperation (structured exchange and mutual support between teachers). Programmes that incorporated more of these principles produced better student outcomes. Programmes incorporating all four had effects roughly four times larger than those incorporating none.

The performance standards finding deserves particular attention. Visscher et al. found that around 80 of their 128 included studies — the majority — contained no clear picture showing teachers what the desired teaching behaviour actually looked like. If teachers do not know what they are aiming for, it is very hard to monitor their own progress, respond to coaching, or learn from peer exchange. The absence of this basic scaffold may go a long way towards explaining why so much professional development, however well-intentioned, leaves practice unchanged.

The broader implication is structural: effective professional development is not a matter of choosing the right topic or hiring the right speaker. It is a matter of designing a learning environment that gives teachers a clear target, supports them in actively working towards it, provides coaching as they try to apply it, and connects them with colleagues doing the same. When all of those conditions are met simultaneously, the evidence suggests the results are substantially better.

Coherence: The Overlooked Ingredient

Garet and colleagues identified a third feature that is both less glamorous and more neglected than duration or active learning: coherence. Professional development is more effective when it connects to what lecturers have already learned, aligns with the goals and expectations operating in their institution, and encourages ongoing professional communication between participants after the sessions end.

This matters because professional learning does not happen in isolated events. It accumulates. An excellent workshop in September is undermined if it contradicts the institutional assessment policy from October, ignores what staff explored last year, and offers no structured way for participants to stay in conversation. Coherence is the connective tissue.

Garet et al. found that coherence predicted changes in classroom practice even after accounting for enhanced knowledge and skills. Lecturers whose professional development was well integrated into the wider landscape of their work were more likely to actually change what they did — even holding their learning gains constant. The implication is humbling: it is not enough to run a good programme in isolation. The programme has to fit.

The Power of Learning Together

There is one structural feature the research treats almost unanimously: collective participation matters. When groups of lecturers from the same department, programme team, or discipline engage in development together, the effects are consistently stronger than when individuals attend alone.

Shared professional context means staff can immediately connect what they are learning to shared curriculum, shared students, shared pressures. Conversations continue in the corridor long after the formal session ends. Accountability is distributed — one person’s enthusiasm does not quietly evaporate when they return to a culture that has not moved with them. And development is more likely to shift collective norms, not just individual practice.

Borko (2004) documents projects where teacher work groups became genuine communities of inquiry — examining student work together, posing shared problems, developing what she calls generative change: an orientation that keeps growing because it is rooted in collaborative habit rather than individual motivation. Visscher et al.’s (2025) finding that teacher cooperation is one of the four design principles that predicts student outcomes provides the most recent quantitative confirmation of this: structured peer exchange is not a nice-to-have feature of professional development but a design requirement.

In higher education, Cox’s long-running work with faculty learning communities at Miami University offers perhaps the most sustained evidence of what this looks like in practice. Over two decades, Cox (2001) found that the single highest-rated component across every type of learning community — junior faculty, senior faculty, issue-focused — was “colleagueship and learning from other participants,” rated above retreats, teaching projects, and even release time. He also documents how these communities function as change agents at the institutional level: shifting culture, building leadership, and creating cross-disciplinary networks that outlast any individual programme. The analogy for higher education is a programme team that meets regularly not to discuss admin, but to genuinely interrogate whether their students are learning what they think they are teaching.

The challenge is that building these communities takes real time and deliberate effort. Trust has to develop. Norms of honest, critical conversation have to be cultivated — which is genuinely hard in environments where teaching quality is evaluated and peer observation can feel threatening. Cox is candid that cultural change at the institutional level takes at least five years of sustained investment before it becomes visible. That timescale alone explains why so many institutions reach for workshops instead.

What This Asks of Institutions

Taken together, this evidence places significant demands on universities. It asks for sustained investment rather than event-based spending. It asks for programmes that are actively structured, coherent, and grounded in clear targets for what good teaching looks like. It asks for the construction of collaborative structures — protected time, department-level communities, facilitated peer observation with real feedback — that outlast individual sessions. And it asks for educational developers who can hold the balance between intellectual challenge and professional trust.

None of this is impossible. But it does require institutions to ask an uncomfortable question: are our academic development offerings designed for lecturer learning, or for the appearance of it?

The mandatory induction day, the seminar series no one returns to, the isolated workshop on a technique that never connects to anything else — these are not nothing. But they are not enough. The research has been telling us this for decades. The question is whether universities are finally willing to treat the professional development of their teaching staff with the same seriousness they apply to research infrastructure.

References & Further Reading

Amundsen, C., & Wilson, M. (2012). Are We Asking the Right Questions? Review of Educational Research, 82, 90–126. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654312438409

Borko, H. (2004). Professional Development and Teacher Learning: Mapping the Terrain. Educational Researcher, 33(8), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X033008003

Cox, M. D. (2001). 5: Faculty Learning Communities: Change Agents for Transforming Institutions into Learning Organizations. To Improve the Academy, 19(1), 69–93. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2334-4822.2001.tb00525.x

Garet, M. S., Porter, A. C., Desimone, L., Birman, B. F., & Yoon, K. S. (2001). What Makes Professional Development Effective? Results From a National Sample of Teachers. American Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 915-945. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312038004915

Sincock, S. P., Jennifer Gore, Elena Prieto, Leanne Fray &. Kristina. (2022). Towards quality teaching in higher education: Pedagogy-focused academic development for enhancing practice. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/1360144X.2022.2103561?needAccess=true

Steinert, Y., Mann, K., Anderson, B., Barnett, B. M., Centeno, A., Naismith, L., Prideaux, D., Spencer, J., Tullo, E., Viggiano, T., Ward, H., & Dolmans, D. (2016). A systematic review of faculty development initiatives designed to enhance teaching effectiveness: A 10-year update: BEME Guide No. 40. Medical Teacher, 38(8), 769–786. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2016.1181851

Visscher, A. J., Dmoshinskaia, N., Pellegrini, M., & Rey-Naizaque, A. (2025). (When) do teacher professional development interventions improve student Achievement? A meta-analysis of 128 high-quality studies. Educational Research Review, 49, 100742. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2025.100742