The quality of teacher professional development (TPD) has become an increasingly prominent global educational issue as teachers face growing scrutiny and pressure to help students “achieve” at higher levels.  While debates and tensions over the scope, form, and focus of TPD continue, teachers are expected to perform according to new and changing standards, and school districts are calling on teachers to reform practices through teacher-learning activities ranging from workshops, to seminars, to classroom modeling.  However, as Cajkler, Wood, Norton, and Pedder (2014) point out, TPD has been historically ineffective in achieving its goals, as “most attempts to improve education have involved activities and changes to structures that do not focus specifically on teaching and learning” (p.512).  With a continuing disconnect between structural changes to the work of teaching (e.g., decision-making about curriculum, instruction, and assessment) and the work of teachers engaged with students in classrooms, this paper addresses a growing need to attend to the way TPD is enacted in today’s schools.

Existing research is vast and inconsistent when recommending TPD methods and approaches.  Additionally, expected TPD outcomes may vary across school districts; what is right for one school may be unhelpful or even impossible for another based on local conditions and organizational culture.  As new forms of professional development continue to evolve and develop, some argue that there is a need to more coherently connect TPD purpose and outcomes with actual activities (Kennedy, 2005).

As research on TPD has largely moved away from isolated workshops and one-time learning sessions (see Lee, 2011; Wilson & Berne, 1999), embedding teacher learning into environments that recreate authentic and shared classroom situations is now seen as crucial to improving instruction (Morris & Hiebert, 2011).  Under this new concept of TPD, the importance of engaging teachers in real-life learning situations is highlighted; however, it is still unclear how these emergent learning theories and activities fit together within a cohesive view of TPD. 

With this in mind, researchers and practitioners are in need of frameworks that not only align professional development activities with established theories, but are also grounded in practical examples.  Additionally, school administrators and teacher leaders may benefit from tools that present professional development options in organized, accessible ways.  To help organize and advance the latest in TPD research and practice, the purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) to provide a model for educators to either evaluate or initiate TPD and (2) to share emergent professional development theory in a highly practical way.  Through this approach, we present the evolution of TPD; practical examples; and related research that supports the notion that it is the presence of K-12 students that has been, and often remains, the “missing link” in TPD.  Further, while abstracted student presence (e.g., systematic analysis of student work by groups of teachers in an after-school meeting) is certainly a TPD advancement, such approaches still leave significant gaps that may be filled by TPD structures which include the physical presence of students.

Ultimately, our research suggests that changes in TPD structures cannot be expected to yield changes in teaching and learning cultures.  Likewise, changes in the culture surrounding TPD cannot be expected to lead to changes in TPD structures.  Rather, changes in TPD structures and culture must occur simultaneously – and that physical student presence is a potential organizing link between the two.  Further, this notion is advanced through well-tested theories of learning inside and outside of Education.

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