Most professional development traditionally has been created for in-service teachers, both new and experienced. Some PD opportunities are fellowships, while others involve some form of mentorship. Increasingly, professional learning communities are being created within schools and districts. In this aspect of professional learning, collaboration and personal reflection can become integral elements to boost educator effectiveness and learning outcome results for all students. What has also emerged is a greater focus on novice teachers and pre-service educators at various stages of their college education and teacher preparation programs. In these important stages of teacher preparation and experience, mentorships with in-service teachers can be invaluable.

EXAMPLES OF PD

Science educators choose their own PD based on a variety of factors. Many opportunities may be offsite and require travel to a university campus, museum, aquarium, national conference, or to a larger federal program at a government institution. Schools or districts often will have teams of science educators develop and participate in professional learning opportunities either at their school or in the district, or via state science teacher association offerings, state Departments of Education, and occasionally at more distant venues.

There are many different elements, characteristics, and components of professional development. Some PDs incorporate multiple facets, while others focus on only one or two specific aspects in the learning experience. PD events often focus on content and subject matter elements and curriculum. These features, along with attention to pedagogy, pedagogical content knowledge, and student misconceptions, have been shown to have positive effects on student learning outcomes.

College courses, partnerships and fellowships with scientists and researchers, and participating in workshops conducting lab activities and experiments are other available ways of engaging in teacher learning, particularly for focusing on subject matter knowledge. Workshops and conferences that include demonstrations and experiments are also available to enhance professional knowledge. Other means of professional learning can involve school-centered initiatives, such as experienced teachers acting as peer coaches, mentors, and facilitators, observing other teachers, school-based collaboration, curriculum development and implementation, and job-embedded PD. Still other workshops may involve outside experts and be focused on learning a particular curriculum (such as AP, Project WET, and in-district programs), learning new science standards (i.e., state, NGSS, Common Core), or discovering new methods to adequately assess students in their mastery of the science. Many of these elements fall under the heading of “active learning,” allowing science teachers to take charge of their professional growth.

Duration and location

Dosage is an important aspect of professional development, defined as the amount of time (contact and active hours, and span of time) spent in the PD program. Dosage also refers to the amount of time spent on particular elements of the learning, such as looking at student data, etc. Learning opportunities can be one day or less, with as little as a few hours after school for a lab activity workshop, to a pre-conference workshop or mini-course, or a week-long summer institute with ongoing PD throughout the school year. Some types of PD programs are designed to teach a specific pedagogy over three to five days, others for two to three weeks, depending if college credit is offered for participation or not.

Many professional learning opportunities are offered online, with some designed to be completed at one’s own pace over the course of a summer or school year. The online PD can be synchronous in real time as a “virtual in-person” experience; asynchronous where participants can engage with PD on their own time in a self-directed manner; and hybrid in which the learning is part of a broader PD of in-person sessions followed by online tasks and virtual collaboration in between sessions. Many professional development providers are making use of the hybrid/mixed participation method of PD as a means to provide professional learning for larger numbers at lower costs, allowing for collaboration beyond the school or district. (For further descriptions of online PD, see the section on “Planning PD” on this website.)

Whatever the mechanism or method, professional development for educators is critical to teachers, particularly teachers of science, for continuing growth in content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, as well as in understanding students’ ideas.