Characteristics of effective teacher professional development: what we know, what we don’t, how we can find out

Several influential reviews and one meta-review have converged on the position that teacher professional development (PD) is more effective when it is: sustained, collaborative, subject-specific, draws on external expertise, has buy-in from teachers and is practice-based. This consensus view has now been incorporated in government policy and official guidance in several countries. Despite this, several recent PD programmes incorporating these characteristics have failed to have any detectable impact on pupil attainment. This article reviews the evidence underpinning the consensus, arguing that the reviews on which it based are methodologically flawed because they employ inappropriate exclusion criteria and depend on an invalid inference method. The consensus view is therefore likely to be inaccurate. Researchers would make more progress on identifying characteristics of effective professional development by looking for alignment between evidence from basic research on human skill acquisition and features of rigorously-evaluated PD interventions.