Let's be honest: Most PD for teachers sucks.

It’s 9:00am in your professional development (PD) seminar, and the slide deck on the screen in front of you is on Slide 6 of 132.

The high school English teacher on your left is secretly grading essays under the table. The Kindergarten teacher is quietly wondering how “Fishbowl Discussions” apply to five-year-olds who are still learning to regulate their emotions and tie their shoes. And the facilitator “friend of the district” reads every bullet on the screen aloud, despite the fact that everyone in the room learned to read decades ago.

The irony is comical: teachers who spend countless hours designing lessons to engage their students are being taught in ways they would never dream of using in their own classrooms.

Everyone leaves with the same handout. No one leaves with an answer on how they’ll work what they “learned” into their teaching practice on Monday. By Tuesday, the handout is buried under a stack of student work and forgotten entirely.

This scene is so familiar that it has become an accepted part of the profession. But it shouldn’t be. The evidence is increasingly clear: most teacher professional development simply doesn’t work.

TNTP’s benchmark study The Mirage found that despite the fact that districts spent an average of $18,000 per teacher annually on PD and teachers spend roughly 150 hours per year in professional learning, there were no measurable improvements in teaching effectiveness.

Thomas Guskey’s more recent

The problem is in the way we’ve designed professional learning. It ignores what decades of research tells us about how adults learn. And it’s unfortunately become the status quo.

And while the scene above hints at most of PD’s shortcomings, the most fundamental is this: professional learning is often disconnected from what teachers are actually expected to teach every day. Teachers spend several painful hours learning a new instructional approach on Friday, only to return Monday to materials that don’t reflect what they were taught.

This disconnect between teacher PD and what’s being taught in the classroom is what adds to instructional incoherence, the lack of alignment between curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Instead of reinforcing a shared instructional vision, teachers receive competing messages about what effective teaching looks like. The result is fragmented learning for students, lower teacher confidence, and a growing sense that instructional leaders “just don’t get it.” It’s a recipe for poor teacher buy-in that perpetuates a status quo of disconnect, lack of accountability, and strong barriers to change.

It’s one of the reasons curriculum implementation breaks down once it’s adopted by schools. Adopting a new curriculum is an entire systems-level reset. But it’s only as good as the teachers who are teaching it. Great curriculum matters. But curriculum alone doesn’t change classrooms; putting it into practice with 25 squirmy children takes work.

Teachers need time to study the curriculum, ask questions, practice instructional tactics, and learn how to bring it to life for students. And while it seems obvious we need to make a change, the status quo has remained for decades. A RAND Corporation survey found that almost a quarter of teachers receive no professional learning on how to implement their curricular materials, and just over a third reported receiving 1 to 5 hours over the course of the entire academic year.

So what’s the fix? Here’s what we’ve learned about what makes professional development effective for teachers:

1. Root it in the curriculum.

The biggest challenge with PD is that it’s typically not procured from the school’s curriculum provider. And because of this, it’s almost never aligned to what’s actually being taught in the classroom. More often than not, it’s a local “expert” or “friend of the district” who has an entirely different pedagogical approach from the school’s adopted curriculum. Teachers often leave not knowing what to do with what they just learned. And for those who do try to implement their learnings, it often backfires and manifests in fragmented instruction that doesn’t land with students.

Research shows that teachers need professional learning that is grounded in the specific curriculum or instructional materials that teachers use with their students on a day-to-day basis. In fact, embedded teacher support for implementation can result in over 90% of teachers transferring the skills they developed to their practice. It’s the foundation that sets teachers up for success in the classroom.

2. Make it frequent and ongoing.

Most PD is a one-off event. There’s no recurring learning. Teachers are simply expected to absorb all that’s been “taught,” implement it into their practice, and never revisit it again. But we know that for PD to be effective it needs to be sustained over a period of time. The most effective professional development programs require anywhere from 30 to 80 hours of learning through instruction, practice and coaching. Eighty hours. It’s no wonder teachers aren’t learning much. How can they when they’re doing it only once for 3 hours on a Friday afternoon after a long week that’s left them feeling drained? It doesn’t make sense.

3. Create opportunities for peer-to-peer learning.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it here again: learning is inherently social. And the research backs it up: a large study across one urban district found that teachers in schools with higher-quality collaboration produced stronger student achievement in both math and reading, and that teachers improved faster when they worked in more collaborative settings (Ronfeldt, Farmer, McQueen, & Grissom, 2015).

What’s more? Teachers say it themselves: in a recent RAND survey on professional development, most teachers said collaborative learning opportunities were the most effective at improving their teaching or students’ learning.

Yet teachers are never given time for shared planning or to participate in professional learning communities that align teachers’ practice in service of students. Professional development becomes less about the teachers and more about whatever pedagogy is being taught.

The result? Teachers end up operating in silos–their own “egg crates”—and for students, learning becomes fragmented.

4. Build in time for observation, feedback and coaching.

When I started teaching, I remember being observed only once in a two-year span. The kicker? It was for compliance, not for professional development. I felt like a ship at sea without an anchor, just drifting along trying to find my way. I had no support, no one to give me feedback.

This has unfortunately become the status quo. But how are teachers expected to improve their practice, if they’re never given feedback?

Research spanning 17 years found that when teachers received sustained instructional coaching, students consistently learned more. Students of coached teachers scored nearly 19 points higher on English language proficiency exams, and after teachers received two years of coaching, student English Language Arts scores rose 22%.

The biggest improvements were among English learners and other historically underserved students, suggesting that coaching can be a powerful lever for improving educational equity.

It’s about time we give teachers the coaching they need to better support our students.

5. Create opportunities to practice.

Learning doesn’t happen by sitting through a presentation. It happens through practice, feedback, and iteration.

Think about it: we don’t ask kids to write essays after a single three-hour lecture on thesis statements. We ask them to draft, receive feedback, revise and try again. It’s the same with teaching.

But this is exactly how most professional development works. Teachers are introduced to a new instructional approach and expected to implement it immediately without ever getting an opportunity to practice.

Effective professional development gives teachers opportunities to rehearse new instructional practices before they use them with students. That might mean modeling lessons with colleagues, practicing discussion protocols, analyzing student work, or receiving targeted coaching on implementation. More than just knowledge, these experiences enable teachers to build the confidence and skill to bring great instruction to life.

Curriculum doesn’t implement itself. Teachers do.

And teachers deserve professional learning that is as intentional, coherent, and evidence-based as the instruction we expect them to deliver to students.