Most schools spend a meaningful part of their budget and their teachers' goodwill on professional development that changes very little. This is not because leaders choose badly. It is because the format schools inherited — the one-off training day — is close to the least effective way of changing what happens in classrooms.
Why the training day rarely works
The standard model is familiar: a day in September, an external speaker, a set of ideas that feel energising, and a return to teaching on Monday with no structure for putting any of it into practice. By half term, almost nothing has changed.
The problem is not the content, which is often good. It is that changing how someone teaches is a skill-acquisition problem, and skills are not acquired by listening. A teacher who has understood an idea has not yet learned to do it — under time pressure, with thirty children, while also managing everything else a lesson demands.
What the evidence says works
The most useful synthesis of this question remains Helen Timperley's Teacher Professional Learning and Development: Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration (2007), which examined professional learning that demonstrably improved student outcomes. Five characteristics recurred:
- Extended time. Effective programmes ran over months, with multiple opportunities to learn, try, and return.
- A focus on student outcomes. The question driving the learning was not "is this an interesting idea?" but "what difference does this make to what our students learn?"
- Engagement with teachers' existing beliefs. Teachers arrive with well-developed theories about how learning works. Professional development that ignores those theories tends to be politely absorbed and quietly discarded.
- External expertise. Schools rarely improve teaching using only the knowledge already in the building. Something has to come in from outside.
- A supportive school culture. Leadership that protects the time, models the learning, and does not undermine it with competing priorities.
Timperley also makes a distinction that reframes the whole question: professional development is something done to teachers; professional learning is something teachers do. Programmes designed as delivery tend to produce compliance. Programmes designed as learning produce change.
Knowledge first, then practice
There is a sequencing question underneath all of this, and the cognitive science is reasonably clear about it.
Daniel Willingham, in Why Don't Students Like School? (2009), makes the case that thinking well about something requires knowing a good deal about it — that factual knowledge precedes skill rather than competing with it. His summary of how memory works, "memory is the residue of thought", applies as much to teachers learning to teach as to students learning anything else. Teachers remember what they have thought hard about, not what they have been shown.
Paul Kirschner, with John Sweller and Richard Clark, made the related argument in their 2006 paper Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: novices learning something new need explicit instruction and worked examples, because discovery approaches overload limited working memory. A teacher encountering an unfamiliar technique is, in that moment, a novice. Expecting them to work it out from principles in a live classroom is exactly the condition the research warns against.
The practical implication is a sequence: build the shared knowledge first, then support the practice. Schools that reverse this — launching coaching or learning walks before staff share an understanding of what they are working towards — usually find the conversations go in circles.
Designing a programme that sticks
1. Establish a shared model of effective teaching
Before anything else, the staff need a common language. Without one, "good questioning" means something different in every department, and every subsequent conversation has to negotiate its own terms. This is unglamorous work and it is the foundation for everything after it.
2. Cover the whole staff, not the enthusiasts
Improvement that reaches only the teachers who volunteer produces a widening gap, not a rising standard. Consistency across classrooms is what parents and inspectors actually experience.
3. Space the learning out
Distributed practice beats massed practice — one of the most robust findings in cognitive science, and as true for adults as for children. Nine sessions across a year will outperform the same content compressed into two days.
4. Require something to be demonstrated
Attendance is not evidence of learning. Building in a point where each teacher has to show they have understood the material changes how they engage with it.
5. Connect it to real lessons
Professional learning that never touches a teacher's actual classroom stays theoretical. There has to be a route from the idea to Tuesday's lesson, and back again.
6. Decide in advance how you will know if it worked
This is the step most often skipped, and it should be settled before the programme starts rather than after.
Measuring impact honestly
John Hattie's argument in Visible Learning (2009) is that the decisive factor is whether teachers and schools can see the effect of what they do — "know thy impact". Applied to CPD, that means being able to answer a specific question: has teaching in this school changed, in ways we can point to, since we started?
Most schools cannot answer it. Attendance registers, evaluation forms and enthusiasm in the room measure engagement, not change. The harder measure is what happens in lessons months later — and gathering that evidence consistently, across every teacher, is precisely what has historically been too expensive to do.
This is the gap Learnalyze was built to close: analysing real lessons against a defined framework so that a school can see whether the standard of teaching is actually moving, rather than inferring it from how well a training day was received.
Common mistakes
- Chasing novelty. A new focus each year prevents anything from embedding. Depth beats breadth.
- Confusing information with training. Telling teachers about a technique is the beginning of the work, not the end of it.
- Leaving out support staff and new joiners. A shared standard erodes quickly if each September's intake never receives it.
- Measuring satisfaction. "Did you enjoy it?" is a question about the session. "What are you doing differently?" is a question about teaching.
- Ignoring the culture. Even excellent professional learning fails in a school where teachers do not feel safe admitting that something is difficult.
How we approach it
Setting The Standard is our attempt to build a programme around these findings rather than around the convenience of a training day: nine sessions covering the full arc of a lesson, spread across a year rather than compressed; 27 masterclass videos; a reflection check after each part that has to be completed to 100%, so understanding is demonstrated rather than assumed; and a portfolio that carries the ideas into real classrooms. It is available in English and Arabic, so bilingual schools can bring an entire staff to the same standard rather than half of it.
If you would like to talk through what this might look like in your school, get in touch.