Teacher Takes Notes

What a remarkable paper on teacher learning taught me about why professional development so often disappoints. And… how might we begin asking better questions…?

Somewhere this week, a teacher is collecting a name badge before walking into a professional development (PD) session. Somewhere else, another is opening a notebook already half-filled with acronyms from previous years. A school leader is introducing a new strategic priority. A keynote speaker is about to explain the future of education. Are you one?

The details differ across countries and school systems, but the rhythm is remarkably familiar. Every year brings fresh language, fresh frameworks and fresh optimism that this time professional learning will translate into better teaching. Can you relate?

Schools invest enormous amounts of time, energy and resources in helping teachers grow. New programmes are introduced. New pedagogies are explored. New ways of thinking are shared and debated. Behind these efforts lies an assumption so familiar that it is rarely articulated: if we design better professional development, better teaching will follow. Can you relate?

Yet for all the attention devoted to professional development, we remain surprisingly poor at answering a much simpler question:

How do teachers actually learn?

That is the question at the heart of Conceptualizing Teacher Professional Learning by Opfer and Pedder (Opfer, V.D. and Pedder, D., 2011. Conceptualizing teacher professional learning. Review of educational research, 81(3), pp.376-407). And it is a more radical question than it first appears.

At first glance, the question seems almost embarrassingly straightforward. Surely we already know the answer. Teachers attend workshops, collaborate with colleagues, observe lessons, reflect on practice, read research, try new strategies, receive feedback and, gradually, become better at what they do.

In fact, educational research has spent decades identifying the characteristics of effective professional development. Sustained programmes appear more effective than one-off workshops. Collaborative learning often outperforms isolated learning. Activities grounded in classroom practice tend to have greater impact than abstract lectures. Active participation is generally preferable to passive listening. Over time, these findings have accumulated into something approaching a consensus.

But Opfer and Pedder invite us to notice something unsettling.

If we know what effective professional development looks like, why do teachers attending the same programme often leave with profoundly different outcomes? Why does an initiative that transforms practice in one school seem to disappear without trace in another? Why do some teachers experience genuine professional growth through activities that possess few of the recognised characteristics of “effective” professional development, while others remain unchanged despite participating in programmes that appear to have all the right ingredients?

These are not minor inconsistencies. They point to a deeper problem.

The authors argue that educational research has often mistaken describing the conditions associated with teacher learning for explaining teacher learning itself. Identifying that collaboration, sustained engagement or active learning frequently accompany professional growth is valuable. But it does not answer the more fundamental question: Why did learning occur here, but not there? Correlation, however robust, is not explanation.

This distinction is more radical than it first appears because it shifts the object of inquiry. Instead of asking, Which professional development activities work?, the paper asks, What kind of phenomenon is teacher learning? That is a very different question. Before prescribing better interventions, we first need to understand the nature of the thing we hope to influence.

As I read the paper, I found myself wondering whether we have accidentally created two entirely different theories of learning.

In classrooms, we have become increasingly sceptical of simple models of student learning. Few teachers today would argue that merely exposing students to good teaching guarantees understanding. We know that learners bring prior knowledge, misconceptions, beliefs, motivations and experiences into every lesson. We know that the same lesson lands differently with different students. We differentiate instruction precisely because learning is not simply something that happens to students; it emerges from the interaction between the learner, the task and the environment.

Yet when it comes to teachers, we often seem to abandon that sophistication.

Professional development is frequently discussed as though attending the right workshop, participating in the right collaborative activity or adopting the right framework should produce better teaching in roughly predictable ways. The language changes, but the underlying assumption remains remarkably linear.

Opfer and Pedder challenge this assumption. They argue that teacher learning is itself a learning process, shaped by prior knowledge, existing beliefs, previous experiences, the immediate learning activity and the wider organisational context. Teacher learning is not the inevitable consequence of participating in professional development. It emerges from the interaction of these systems.

Seen this way, the paper asks us to extend to teachers the same generosity of explanation that we already extend to students.

For when a student doesn’t learn, most thoughtful teachers don’t immediately conclude that the lesson “failed” or that the student “didn’t try.” We ask richer questions. What prior knowledge did the student bring? What misconceptions were already present? What happened in the classroom? What supports were available? How did the social environment shape learning?

Opfer & Pedder are asking us to ask similarly rich questions about teachers. That is a profound shift because it resists treating us teachers as passive recipients of professional development and instead recognises us as learners embedded within systems.

One of the paper’s quiet ironies is this:

Education has spent decades developing increasingly sophisticated theories of student learning while continuing to rely on surprisingly simple theories of teacher learning.

At this point, it would be tempting to look for a better model of professional development. Better workshops. Better facilitators. Better frameworks.

That isn’t where Opfer and Pedder begin.

Instead, they invite us to do something much more unsettling. They ask us to suspend, for a moment, our assumptions about professional development altogether and ask a different question.

What if teacher learning is not an event, but a system?

That shift in perspective changes almost everything.

It asks us to stop looking for the single ingredient that makes professional development “work” and start paying attention to the relationships between the many things that shape us as teachers: the knowledge we already carry into the room, the beliefs we have accumulated through years of practice, the culture of the schools in which we work, the colleagues with whom we collaborate, the tasks we are asked to undertake, and even the timing of when new ideas enter our professional lives. None of these, the paper argues, can adequately explain teacher learning in isolation. It is their interaction that matters.

For me, this was the paper’s most generous insight.

It quietly removes the burden of believing that good teachers should simply absorb every new initiative placed before them. Instead, it acknowledges something every experienced teacher already knows but rarely sees reflected in professional development conversations: learning is messy. It is uneven. It is shaped by context. Sometimes a single conversation changes the course of your teaching. Sometimes an entire year of workshops leaves barely a trace. Neither outcome is mysterious if we understand teacher learning as something that emerges from a complex web of interactions rather than from the professional development activity alone.

Rather than lowering our expectations of professional development, this way of thinking raises them. It asks us to move beyond asking whether a programme was “effective” and begin asking richer questions. Why did it resonate with some teachers and not others? What conditions allowed new ideas to take root? Which parts of the system supported learning, and which quietly resisted it? These are harder questions. They are also, I suspect, the questions that lead to genuine professional growth.

It was these questions that led me to Conceptualizing Teacher Professional Learning by V. Darleen Opfer and David Pedder. Published in 2011, it is not a handbook for designing better professional development, nor does it offer another framework to implement on Monday morning. Instead, it attempts something far more ambitious: to explain what teacher learning actually is.

Before doing so, however, the authors acknowledge something important. They do not dismiss the substantial body of research that has shaped contemporary professional development.

The paper explicitly reviews and synthesises the literature around characteristics of effective professional development, including:

• Sustained duration and intensity (Garet et al., 2001; Guskey, 2000)
• Collaborative professional learning (Little, 1982; Little, 1990),
• Practice-based or situated learning (Ball, 1994; Hawley & Valli, 1999),
• Active teacher engagement, opportunities to discuss, apply and reflect on new knowledge,
• Professional learning communities and networks, content-focused professional development (through the Desimone synthesis).

The authors synthesise decades of evidence showing that teachers tend to learn more effectively when professional learning is sustained rather than episodic, collaborative rather than isolated, rooted in classroom practice rather than abstract theory, and supported by opportunities to discuss, practise and refine new ideas over time. These principles underpin much of what many of us would now recognise as high-quality professional development.

And yet, the paper insists, accepting these findings is not the same as understanding teacher learning. It is this aspect of the paper that truly intrigued me, egging me on to read all 33 pages.

I ended up noting the…

Five assumptions about teacher learning that this paper quietly dismantles

Myth 1: Good professional development causes teacher learning.

This is perhaps the most pervasive assumption in education. If we can design professional development with the right ingredients—more collaboration, more sustained engagement, more classroom relevance—teacher learning should naturally follow.

The paper begins by acknowledging that decades of research have indeed identified characteristics associated with effective professional development. Sustained programmes tend to outperform one-off workshops. Collaborative learning often outperforms isolated learning. Practice-based activities generally outperform abstract lectures. These findings matter.

But then Opfer and Pedder ask a question that changes everything.

If these characteristics explain teacher learning, why do teachers participating in the same programme often learn very different things? Why do some teachers experience profound change through activities that appear to lack these “effective” characteristics altogether?

The problem, they argue, is that we have confused the conditions associated with learning with learning itself.

Myth 2: If we know what works, we have explained why it works.

This is the paper’s central critique.

Educational research, the authors argue, has become remarkably good at identifying relationships between professional development features and teacher change. But identifying a relationship is not the same as explaining a phenomenon.

Their criticism is philosophical as much as methodological. They describe this as an epistemological fallacy: treating observed relationships—for example, collaboration or activity-based learning—as though they constitute teacher learning itself. Even very strong correlations leave the essential causal question unanswered:

Why?

The authors therefore call for a shift away from process-product research towards explanatory causality—research that asks not simply whether something works, but under what conditions, for whom, why, and how teacher learning emerges.

This is, I think, the paper’s biggest intellectual contribution.

Myth 3: More of a good thing is always better.

Educational improvement often operates with an implicit logic of accumulation. More collaboration. More coaching. More reflection. More autonomy.

Opfer and Pedder caution against this linear thinking.

Drawing on Nuthall and Alton-Lee’s Goldilocks Principle, they argue that many influences on learning are curvilinear rather than additive. Too little collaboration may inhibit learning; too much may become counterproductive. Too much centralisation limits professional judgement; too much decentralisation fragments collective effort. The challenge is not maximisation but balance.

This idea resonated deeply with me because it replaces educational recipes with educational judgement.

Myth 4: Teacher learning happens inside individual teachers.

By the second half of the paper, the focus shifts dramatically.

Teacher learning is no longer treated as something that happens inside an individual attending a workshop. Instead, the authors describe three overlapping systems that continuously interact:

• the individual teacher,
• the school,
• the learning activity itself.

Each system influences the others.

Teachers bring prior knowledge, beliefs, motivations and experiences into every learning opportunity. Schools shape norms, expectations and opportunities for learning. Professional learning activities create their own structures and affordances.

Teacher learning emerges from the interaction between these systems—not from any one of them acting alone.

For classroom teachers, this is a remarkably hopeful idea.

It suggests that when learning stalls, the answer is not necessarily “try harder.” Sometimes the more useful question is, Which part of the system is constraining learning?

Myth 5: There is a universal recipe for teacher learning.

By the end of the paper, Opfer and Pedder are asking us to rethink the very purpose of research.

Rather than searching for universally effective professional development programmes, they argue that researchers should investigate the different combinations of conditions under which teacher learning emerges. Similar outcomes may arise through entirely different pathways because contexts, teachers and schools differ. Variation is not a nuisance to be controlled; it is part of the phenomenon itself.

The implication is profound.

The future of teacher learning may depend less on discovering the next great intervention than on developing richer explanations of how teachers grow.

Seeing teacher learning differently

If you’ve followed the argument this far, you may be wondering what the authors propose in place of the familiar process-product model.

Their answer is complexity theory.

Don’t let the name intimidate you.

In this paper, complexity theory isn’t presented as another educational trend or another framework to add to your professional vocabulary. It is simply a different way of understanding how learning happens. Rather than assuming that one cause leads predictably to one effect, complexity theory asks us to pay attention to the relationships between people, contexts and experiences. It assumes that learning emerges from interactions, not interventions.

Think about your own classroom.

You have probably taught the same lesson to two classes with entirely different outcomes. You have watched one student flourish after a brief conversation while another, despite weeks of carefully planned support, continues to struggle. You have introduced the same strategy two years in succession, only to find that it transforms one cohort and falls flat with the next.

You don’t conclude that learning is random.

You conclude that it is complex.

The same, Opfer and Pedder argue, is true of teachers.

Teacher learning does not emerge from professional development alone. It emerges from the continuous interaction between three interconnected systems: the individual teacher, the learning activity and the school itself. Every teacher arrives with different experiences, different beliefs about learning, different professional identities and different classroom histories. Every school possesses its own culture, norms, relationships and collective habits. Every professional learning activity introduces its own opportunities and constraints. Teacher learning emerges not from any one of these systems in isolation, but from the ways they continually influence one another.

This way of thinking does something surprisingly liberating.

It shifts our attention away from asking whether a professional development programme was “good” or “bad” and towards understanding the conditions under which learning becomes possible. It reminds us that improvement is rarely linear. Sometimes a single conversation with a trusted colleague reshapes years of practice. Sometimes an entire term of workshops leaves little lasting change. Complexity theory does not dismiss either outcome as success or failure. It asks us to understand the system that produced it.

So what does this mean for us?

This is where I found myself returning to a remark by Sir Ken Robinson:

“If you’re a teacher, for your students, you are the system. If you’re a school principal, for your community, you are the system. If you’re the policymaker, for the schools you control, you are the system.”

Those words acquire new meaning after reading Opfer and Pedder.

If you are a teacher, your professional growth cannot be reduced to the workshops you attend. Pay attention to the beliefs you hold about learning, the questions you ask, the colleagues with whom you think, and the habits you cultivate between formal professional development sessions. They are not peripheral to your learning; they are part of the system that shapes it.

If you are a teacher educator or trainer, recognise that no amount of careful programme design can guarantee learning. Your work extends beyond delivering excellent content. It includes creating the conditions in which teachers can connect new ideas to prior knowledge, test them in practice, discuss them openly and revisit them over time. The quality of the activity matters, but so do the systems into which it enters.

If you are a school leader, culture is not an optional extra sitting alongside professional development. It is one of the conditions through which professional learning either flourishes or withers. Time, trust, shared norms, opportunities for collaboration and collective beliefs about learning are not administrative concerns; they are educational ones.

And if you help shape educational policy, this paper offers a gentle caution. There may never be a universally effective model of professional development because there is no universal teacher or universal school. Policies that acknowledge variation, context and the reciprocal relationship between teachers, schools and learning activities are more likely to support meaningful professional growth than those searching for a single best programme.

Perhaps that is the paper’s most hopeful message.

Teacher learning is not something that can simply be delivered.

Neither is it something that happens by chance.

It emerges from the systems we create, the relationships we nurture and the professional cultures we choose to build.

The paper is ultimately optimistic. It doesn’t tell us that teacher learning is too complex to understand. It tells us that we have been asking questions that were too simple.

Questions Worth Carrying Into Your Next Professional Learning Experience

If Opfer and Pedder have taught us anything, it is this: better professional learning begins with better questions.

If you are a teacher like me…

Instead of asking:

• What strategy should I try next?

I’d ask:

• Why did this idea resonate with me while another one didn’t?
• Which of my existing beliefs is this new learning challenging?
• What prior experiences am I bringing into this learning opportunity?
• What conditions help me learn most effectively as a professional?
• How has my school environment shaped—not just supported or hindered—my learning?

If you are a teacher educator, instructional coach or trainer…

Instead of asking:

• Did participants enjoy the session?

Try perhaps:

• What assumptions are teachers bringing into this room?
• How will today’s learning connect with their existing knowledge and classroom realities?
• What opportunities will teachers have to revisit, adapt and refine these ideas over time?
• Which teachers are likely to benefit most from this approach—and who might need something different?
• Am I designing a workshop, or am I designing the conditions for learning?

If you are a school leader…

Instead of asking:

• How many hours of professional development have we provided this term?

Maybe:

• What beliefs about learning define our school culture?
• What conversations about teaching happen when no one is observing?
• Does our timetable create space for teachers to think, collaborate and experiment?
• What invisible norms encourage learning here—and which quietly discourage it?
• If an outstanding professional learning opportunity arrived tomorrow, would our culture help it take root?

If you shape educational policy…

Instead of asking:

• Which programme should every school implement?

Try:

• What conditions enable teacher learning across different contexts?
• How much flexibility have we built into our policies for schools to respond to local realities?
• Are we measuring participation, implementation or genuine learning?
• What explanations of teacher learning are our policies built upon?

Perhaps the most enduring lesson from Conceptualizing Teacher Professional Learning is not that teacher learning is complicated. It is that teachers deserve explanations of their learning that are as sophisticated as the explanations we seek for our students’ learning.

The next time you leave a workshop, facilitate one, lead one, or commission one, resist the temptation to ask simply, “Did it work?”

Instead, ask a better question. Because better questions don’t just produce better research.

They produce better teachers, stronger schools and, ultimately, richer learning for every child they serve.