Five Lessons for Growing Strong Pre-K Teachers

High-quality teachers are an essential component of an effective pre-K program. Professional learning, when designed and implemented well, can help pre-K teachers develop the knowledge and competencies needed to best serve young children. These program profiles illustrate that offering high-quality professional learning requires planning and careful implementation. Programs need to create structures and content that align with the research about how both adults and children learn best. Below are five lessons for professional learning design and implementation that emerged from our research on these programs.

1. Embrace that high-quality professional learning is an investment of time…Effective models should be sustained over time because even the best professional learning opportunities are unlikely to change teacher practice overnight. As Dale Farran at Vanderbilt’s Peabody Research Institute explained in an interview, “helping teachers change their behavior is a lot harder than helping children change theirs.” And even when teachers do change their practice, there is unlikely to be an instant change in student behavior and outcomes. For instance, teachers may spend one year in the TEC Mentor program and may slowly integrate technology into their classrooms as they become more comfortable using it throughout the year. By the time the program ends and they feel confident integrating technology into everyday instruction, the school year is ending and they will be starting fresh with a new class of pre-K students. It may take multiple years to see meaningful changes in student outcomes.
   
   …And money. Many of the components of high-quality professional learning are expensive. An ongoing and sufficiently intensive program requires a significant commitment of staff time. One-on-one coaching and mentoring have substantial personnel costs, as does hiring substitute teachers or rearranging staff schedules to ensure that teachers can participate in professional learning during regular work hours. The technology and time needed for meaningful data collection can also be costly. When allocating funding, programs should also set aside adequate resources for program evaluation when possible. Because many programs that fit the bill for quality do not actually change teacher practice or impact student outcomes, an evaluation is needed to determine whether a program is effective. Sufficient funding for evaluation, which can be costly, is important to ensure that a program is meeting its goals. As the developers of CLI Engage discovered, when the program did not receive adequate funding it was difficult to conduct research on what was working and virtually impossible to scale the program.

   The federal government currently sets aside funding for professional learning in Head Start and through Title II of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). State and local governments can use ESSA funding to support instruction for children starting at birth. However, the Trump administration has recently proposed eliminating Title II.¹ States and districts, often running on low budgets, depend on Title II funding to support educators. The federal government should continue to support states in providing high-quality professional learning that aligns with the research. Each of the programs we profile found inadequate funding to be a barrier to growth and sustainability.

2. Help teachers and administrators see the value early on. All of the programs we profiled found that convincing school staff of the value of professional learning was a vital step in the implementation process. Even a well-designed program can experience challenges with implementation when teachers or their leaders are not on board. Creating a culture of professional learning in a program can be difficult, particularly when trusting relationships have not been established between teachers, coaches, administrators, and program developers. Teachers need to know that they can take risks and try out new techniques in a safe and supportive learning environment. When trust is established and good relationships are formed, professional learning programs are often filled with excitement and idea sharing.

   One way to secure teacher buy-in is to make the program voluntary. In both the SciMath-DLL and TEC Mentors programs, for example, teachers chose to participate and were invested in their own learning and development. The relationships they formed with program staff allowed them to feel comfortable incorporating new ideas and techniques into their classroom practice. In San Jose, teachers were given choices about what components of the program they would like to participate in; follow-up coaching was voluntary, for example. So, teachers who did choose to have coaches were receptive and engaged in changing their practice, leaders there say. Conversely, in Nashville, where coaching is required, coaches said that some teachers were “less receptive and that it took more effort to reel them in.”

   It is equally important to have administrator buy-in for a professional learning program to work effectively. When administrators support and understand what teachers are learning, teachers know that what they are learning is integral to achieving the early learning program’s goals for student outcomes. In the TEC Mentors program, school principals were updated about how teachers were learning to integrate of technology into classroom practices. Because principals were kept in the loop, teachers were encouraged to try new things out in their classrooms.

3. Develop opportunities for teacher leadership and growth. Another way to foster investment in a professional learning program is to give teachers opportunities to take ownership of their own learning and assume leadership positions where they can share what they have learned with their colleagues. This is particularly important in order to integrate sustainability into a program. When teachers are empowered to take on leadership roles, they can influence the whole staff’s pedagogical approach by creating a shift in the school or program culture.

   In SciMath-DLL and TEC Mentors, for example, teachers took the initiative to share what they learned in these programs with their colleagues who did not participate. When teacher leadership opportunities are built into a professional learning program, the program’s reach magnifies. PRI offered Nashville teachers who excelled in certain areas to share their expertise with their peers and teachers around the country through blogging. Franklin-McKinley realized that empowering teachers can also be a method of fostering sustainability. It invested in teachers by selecting teacher leaders, training them to be reliable observers, and allowing them to lead PLCs.

4. Coach the coaches. Each of the professional learning programs that we profiled incorporated some form of coaching. While research has shown that personalized coaching can be an effective method for changing teacher practice, it has to be done well. Coaches of pre-K teachers not only need to be experts in how young children learn, but they also need to know how to teach adults. As Bellwether explains, “most evidence-based coaching approaches specify that coaches must have strong relationship-building skills, be able to teach adults as well as children, reliably document and track their work, and implement a coaching model with fidelity.”²

   In the programs we profiled, coaches had varying backgrounds and levels of expertise. Nashville’s coaching program was developed rapidly to assign all pre-K teachers in the district a personal coach. Some MNPS coaches were former administrators, some had been coaching for many years, and others were simply identified as high-quality pre-K teachers the year before and had been asked to coach. While there are benefits to developing teacher leadership, teachers transitioning into a coaching role will need extensive professional learning of their own to know how to best serve teachers. This is especially important when coaches are given autonomy in deciding how to work with their teachers. SciMath-DLL had three workshops just for coaches during the two-year intervention with its first cohort and continues to work with coaches alongside teachers during each phase so that teachers and coaches are all learning STEM content together.

   The field could benefit from more guidance and tools related to coaching competencies, support, and evaluation. Because strong coaching is individualized, it is difficult to evaluate. Bellwether explains that there is a dearth of research determining exactly when coaching is effective and what effective coaching looks like. Additionally, researchers can struggle to determine what benefits are attributable to coaching because other interventions are usually executed at the same time.

5. Align the program model with the latest research on professional learning and use evaluation tools for continuous improvement. Each of the profiled programs incorporates research-based features of professional learning and measures program outcomes with evaluation tools. When programs are designed with teachers in mind they are more effective, particularly if they understand that teachers are adult learners. Professional learning that incorporates best practices will be able to change teacher practice for the better.

   Programs with thoughtful evaluation methodology had a greater ability to adapt and improve through iteration. Among the programs that we profiled, program improvement almost always sought to meet the needs of teachers and create better outcomes for children. The CLI researchers used several randomized controlled trials to determine which features of their professional learning program led to positive student outcomes. When they discovered what program features worked best, they began to scale up their program based on this research. In Nashville, researchers collected extensive data and took practitioners’ feedback and experiences into account as they designed the program. In San Jose, with help from the Early Learning Lab, the Franklin-McKinley School District worked with teachers from the district and community partners to create its professional development model, using several tools to gather data and change program design with each new cycle based on that data and on teacher feedback.