If they are to increase the rigor and effectiveness of their instruction, teachers will need high-quality professional learning opportunities to deepen their content knowledge, develop new forms of practice, strengthen their ability to conduct formative assessments, and revise their perspectives about effective pedagogy and their students' capabilities. 

The Problem

Most district and school leaders acknowledge the need for teacher learning and provide supports for that learning (e.g., coaching, professional development sessions, teacher collaborative meetings). However, to be of value, these supports must be of high quality, and they must be coordinated. The opportunity for powerful professional learning is missed when the focus of the supports is fragmented and piecemeal. For example, teachers might attend district-wide professional development sessions on best practices in formative assessment, engage in ongoing work in teacher collaborative meetings that focuses on analyzing district assessment data to identify students for additional support, and work with a coach on classroom management. While each is important, teachers frequently experience the supports as disconnected, and sometimes as at odds with one another. This problem is often a consequence of the various supports being under the purview of different school and district leaders. For example, it is common for teacher collaborative meetings to be at the discretion of principals, with minimal if any connection to district-based professional development and coaching. 

What Can Be Done?

As an example of a coherent system of supports for teachers, imagine that a district aims to enable content area teachers to lead whole class discussions in which students are supported and pressed to make sense of each other’s reasoning. The district might offer a sequence of professional development sessions for teachers in each content area that are organized around the instructional materials teachers are using, and that focus on essential practices in planning for and leading productive discussions. Meanwhile, at their schools, teachers could work together with a trained facilitator in their collaborative time to plan effective discussions in upcoming lessons. (In mathematics, for example, this might include identifying the key goals of upcoming lessons, anticipating how students will complete a task, and planning how to select and sequence a discussion of student work. In social studies, it might involve identifying primary documents to inform a student discussion of alternative interpretations of an historical event). The participating teachers could then work with a coach to enact a co-planned lesson. The coach and teacher might subsequently analyze what happened in the lesson, and why, perhaps by analyzing student work or a video-recording of the lesson. 

Of course, the extent to which a system of professional learning supports is effective depends on the quality of the supports. Research studies have identified specific features of a high-quality, coherent system of supports. Such systems should: 

• be organized around the materials teachers actually use in their classroom. <20>
• provide sustained opportunities for teachers to routinely work with school colleagues (e.g., grade level, content) to support the development of the trust necessary to open up practice and build on each other’s expertise. <21>
• support teacher agency and desire to persist at developing ambitious practices, in part by focusing on or connecting with what teachers view as significant problems of practice. 
• provide opportunities for teachers to strengthen their ability to conduct the type of formative assessments that inform the improvement of their instruction. It is common for districts to implement formative assessment initiatives that manifest as quick checks on whether students “got it” and thus whether parts of lessons need to be retaught. Quick checks such as “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” while providing some information, do not help teachers understand why some students did not “get it.” In more productive formative assessment, teachers first analyze evidence of students’ reasoning (e.g., students’ written work, their responses to in-class questions) to determine what they actually learned during a lesson. It is only then that teachers analyze their instruction, and they do so to explain why their students learned what they actually learned, rather than what they hoped they would learn. In accounting for students’ learning in terms of instruction, teachers necessarily identify instructional strengths but also weaknesses that can then become areas for instructional improvement.
• provide opportunities to both investigate and enact new practices. <22> Professional development typically provides opportunities to investigate practice—to engage in formative assessment using student work, as described above, and to, analyze and reflect on records of practice, like video-recordings or case studies of instruction. However, opportunities to enact the desired forms of practice, ideally with support from a colleague with relevant expertise, increases the impact on teaching practice. In addition, enactment provides teachers who harbor low expectations for students with the opportunity to observe their students participating in and learning from equitable, high-quality instruction. Without evidence of students’ capabilities, these teachers may resist efforts to shift their instructional practices.
  

Systemically coordinating high-quality supports for teachers’ learning gives teachers a shared, sustained focus. As a result, teachers may come to view each other as having relevant expertise and begin to turn to each other for instructional advice. As teachers’ instructional visions and content knowledge deepen, they more readily turn to others, including coaches, for assistance in improving their practice. <23>