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An education professor explains that, with coaching and student-included PD, educators no longer worry about teaching with (or breaking!) high-tech tools.

We’ve all sat through meaningless professional development (PD). Whether it’s provided by someone so far removed from the classroom that they can’t relate to the demands today’s teachers face, or just something that could have been handled in an email. We would rather spend productive hours planning engaging projects or reviewing student work instead. At Maryville University, we’ve been using research to create effective, engaging PD that helps teachers implement new technologies and curricula that truly improve student learning. Since then, we’ve traveled to multiple districts replicating this model.

Our School of Education’s Center for Access and Achievement (CA²) conducts frequent PD in STEM, especially for pre-K–12 robotics. We’ve developed two effective models of professional development that work extremely well, both in terms of teacher engagement and learning, and in terms of student achievement. Here are some practical best practices to help any school district implement these two models, which are student-included PD (SIPD) and coaching.

Student-Included Professional Development (SIPD)

In our CREST-M (Children using Robotics for Engineering, Science, Technology, and Math) project, focused on creating STEM curricula using LEGO WeDo 2.0 robotics, we’ve had dozens of teachers and hundreds of students learn together. In the SIPD model, teachers work in the summers with small groups of students from their districts, going through the math-robotics curricula together, with an expert teacher there to help guide them.

It helps to have one teacher with expertise in robotics and a strong background in math education, along with 4–5 teachers learning the material and about 20 students split into small groups. The questions and challenges that arise are far easier to work out the first time with a small group than a large one. In this way, teachers learn the curriculum especially well and are completely ready to take their full classes through it during the school year. School administrators report very high implementation rates and teacher confidence. Pre- and post-assessment of the students also demonstrates very strong improvement in math.

Check out the entire article here.