ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore what is currently known about the effectiveness of teachers’ professional development (PD) programs or PD interventions on the quality of teachers, their teaching and student learning. PD activities refer to a wide range of activities in which teachers participate, such as information meetings, study days, 1-day workshops and training sessions; coaching and intervision; mentoring, classroom observations, participation in a network, offsite team training sessions, book and study clubs; and research projects. Most of the current PD activities can be characterized as traditional forms of PD. Traditional refers to the way PD was organized for the last decades: mainly through lectures, 1-day workshops, seminars and conferences, which were not situated at the workplace, in which teachers played a passive role, and in which the content was not adjusted to the problems and issues in the daily teaching practice. Innovative forms refer to all those interventions in which teachers do play an active role, and the issues in their own teaching practice determine the content. Some examples are collaboration of colleagues, study and book clubs, mentoring, coaching, intervision and research by teachers. It also includes the discourse on professional learning communities in which the emphasis is on the collective responsibility of teachers for the learning of their students and insights on teaching and PD (see also the chapter of Judith Warren Little in this volume; Borko, Jacobs & Koellner, 2010).
