In today’s world, educators are expected to maintain the knowledge and skills necessary to meet the diverse learning needs of their students. Through America’s history, this expectation has garnered consensus and is now established to begin in pre-service teaching programs (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2001) and continue throughout an educator’s career (Desimone, 2011). Within schools and districts, professional development activities are created with the intention to advance teaching practice; unfortunately, they are generally not effective at changing classroom processes, teacher understanding, or student achievement (Wei, Darling-Hammond, & Adamson, 2010).
Research has defined the features of effective professional development, including reform type, duration, collective participation, active learning, coherence and content focus (Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001); each of these features has additional aspects illuminating a guide for improving teacher learning. The two aspects studied in this research are time and collaboration. For time, the hours spent in professional development activities are binned into categories of effectiveness: under 14 hours is not effective, 14-29 hours showed small effects, and 30-100 hours showed the largest effects on teacher learning and student achievement (Banilower, Heck, & Weiss, 2007; McGill-Franzen, Yokoi, Brooks, & Allington, 1999, Yoon, Duncan, Lee, Scarloss, & Shapley, 2007). The next aspect studied is collaboration, defined here as the process that brings educators together to analyze and improve their practice (DuFour, 2005) and enables them to teach and learn from each other (Schmoker, 2005) to benefit the school, the district, and their students (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Goddard, Goddard, & Tschannen-Moran, 2007; Saunders, Goldenberg, & Gallimore, 2009).
This empirical case study examines how one urban district distributes the 856 professional development activities that occurred in one school year in terms of time and collaboration. The district delineated types of activities according to how they were created, at the schools, within the feeder patterns, or by district departments. Utilizing data collected by the district, the amount of time in professional development activities are categorized, examined, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) completed. Additionally, participants in these activities completed district created evaluations that included their perceptions of collaboration within the activities. The activity means are examined and ANOVA utilized. Secondarily, chi-square tests are used to analyze the association between the types of activities, time, and collaboration.
Generally, the findings of this study revealed that in this district, professional development activities created by the schools were longer than those created by feeder patterns or district departments; although it appeared that the hours in the activities were not long enough to significantly impact teacher or student learning according to the literature. Findings on the perceptions of collaboration suggest that the district’s activities were collaborative, with school site activities generally noted as more collaborative. More research is needed to understand the association, advance the literature, and assist schools and districts in creating effective professional development that increases teacher and student learning.