Question 5
What is the evidence that CPD has an impact on teaching and learning?
Securing rigorous evidence about the long term impact of CPD on teachers, teaching and student learning is difficult. There are so many factors between CPD activities and learning outcomes. Research and evaluation that rises to the challenge is bound to be costly and there is a high risk that research that gets close enough to the teachers, the students and the CPD will have a significant impact on teaching and learning in its own right.
Nonetheless, the NUT has sponsored the establishment of a systematic research review group to collect, weigh and make accessible the evidence that does exist. This review group is registered with the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre (EPPI Centre), the current gold standard for conducting reviews of research in education in the UK.
The first review from this group sponsored by NUT and GTC has focused on the impact of collaborative and sustained CPD. It has identified over 13,500 titles and abstracts as relevant to its question and identified 17 reports from the 274 full reports scrutinised as showing a positive link between collaborative, sustained CPD and the following:
Teacher…
- self confidence;
- belief in their capacity to make a difference to students’ learning;
- enthusiasm for collaborative working (notwithstanding initial anxieties about observation and feedback);
- commitment to changing practice and continuing learning.
Student…
- motivation;
- performance;
- responses to specific subjects;
- organisation of work;
- sophistication in responses to questions;
- repertoire of learning strategies.
The CPD that was linked with these benefits involved;
- the use of external specialist expertise (in the focus of the CPD and in working with teachers);
observation;
- feedback (usually based on observation);
- an emphasis on peer support rather than leadership by supervisors;
- scope for participants to identify their own focus;
- processes to encourage, extend and structure professional dialogue; and
- process for sustaining CPD over time to enable teachers to embed the practice in classroom settings.
These findings are consistent with earlier interpretive (rather than systematic) research reviews of evidence about teacher acquisition and use of knowledge (see, for example, Cordingley, Bell 2000), even though the review focused exclusively upon collaborative CPD. Other features of effective CPD highlighted in these earlier, interpretive reviews include the importance of CPD focusing either on:
- an area that the teachers involved care about deeply; or
- as area that teachers are compelled to address (e.g. by Ofsted requirements); or
- a strategy where there is strong evidence of a positive impact on student learning.
If you would like to know more about the systematic research reviews click here for the EPPI website.
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