Designing Performance-Based Professional Development: Stakeholder Views on Essential Competencies and Approaches

Research has consistently shown that the instructional skills, or competencies, that teachers bring to the table influence the opportunities students have to learn. Teachers build those competencies over time, often through professional development (PD); however, they often cite PD as insufficient, in part because it can focus on the wrong competencies. In a series of focus groups, we systematically examined which teaching competencies teachers, teacher leaders, school administrators, and professional learning leaders identified as most critical for future PD efforts supporting K-8 mathematics and science teachers. In addition, we explored their stated rationales and their vision for how digital performance-based PD might support development of those competencies. Participants identified four competencies as most critical: (1) collaborative problem-based learning; (2) differentiation; (3) promoting engagement; and (4) eliciting student ideas. Rationales included ways in which they are essential for students, difficult to implement, and have insufficient support at present. Participants preferred the idea of digital and interactive role-playing PD over more traditional approaches, also citing the need for some agency in controlling the PD parameters and for the availability of rich feedback. Implications include the need for future research to incorporate stakeholder voice to close the gap between what is needed and what is provided and for follow-up studies to target a larger and more representative sample.