Researchers and practitioners have long viewed professional development (PD) as a tool to improve teacher practice and student learning. However, despite its promise, PD is perceived by these same stakeholders as unevenly effective. This chapter considers one reason for this gap: the macro sociopolitical context in which professional development is designed and facilitated. For decades, the dominant sociopolitical framework governing education broadly (and PD in particular) is one that prioritizes efficiency. Drawing on a broad survey of empirical and theoretical literature, I apply the lens of political theory to propose an alternative deliberative framework that is more compatible with principles of effective learning and thus more likely to improve learning across contexts. I further examine exemplars of deliberative-style PD at both the school- and system-level. I conclude that reframing the puzzle of professional development as relational (rather than procedural) offers new opportunities for improvement.

In recent history, the landscapes of education policy and practice have become increasingly driven by state systems of accountability. Passed in 2001, the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) codified the use of educational accountability systems that rely on largely quantitative measures – standardized tests, especially – to assess student learning outcomes, rank order districts and schools according to these outcomes, and prescribe sanctions for schools and districts not meeting achievement targets. Meanwhile, American public schools have rapidly resegregated (Frankenberg et al., 2019) since reaching the height of statistical desegregation in 1988 (Orfield et al., 2014).2 A 2022 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that more than one-third of all K-12 public school students attend a school where at least 75 percent of the enrollment comes from the same racial background. In this brief, we look to recent empirical research to consider what, if any, relationship exists between systems of accountability and the persistence of school segregation.

Learner engagement is essential for deep and sustained learning, yet it is seldom included in empirical frameworks for effective continuing professional development (CPD), which tend to privilege broad design features over learner-centred strategies. In this critical case study, I consider this gap by applying the lens of self-determination theory (SDT) to analyse in depth what one U.S.-based teacher described as a transformational professional learning experience. Observing the ways in which learner engagement and facilitators’ pedagogical practices combine to satisfy SDT’s basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness and to shape this teacher’s practice, I suggest that relational responsiveness – what the focus teacher in this study calls ‘regard’ – is an important and under-theorised quality in powerful professional learning. I conclude with theoretical and practical implications for the design and study of continuing professional development.

Professional development (PD) for teachers is widely variable in its effectiveness. Efforts to improve PD at scale are complicated by the tremendous heterogeneity among teachers: what works for one teacher may work not at all for another. Using the lens of professional identity to analyze teachers’ perceptions of PD, I present and discuss five in-depth teacher accounts of their most powerful professional learning experiences, concluding that professional identity is a durable (but malleable) filter through which teachers interpret professional learning. I offer implications for how a better understanding of professional identity could be used to improve PD design and policy.

Professional development (PD) is seen by a broad cross-section of stakeholders — teachers, principals, policymakers — as essential for instructional improvement and student learning. And yet, despite deep investments of time and money in its design and implementation, the return on investment and subjective assessments about PD’s effectiveness remain uneven. In this thesis, I focus in-depth on professional development experiences that teachers identify as their most powerful and ask what these experiences could suggest toward improving PD design, policy, and research.

Specifically, drawing on 25 in-depth accounts of powerful professional learning, I analyze PD across three papers, each of which applies a distinct analytical lens. First, using self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985, 2000), I explore the extent to which powerful learning experiences help to satisfy the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Second, using the growing body literature on professional identity (e.g., Beijaard et al., 2004), I posit that teachers may be motivated to pursue professional learning experiences that align with their core beliefs and identity. Extending this literature, I elaborate three distinct conceptions of how identity interacts with PD: an affinity for the what (content), the who (facilitation), and the with whom (community). I similarly discuss ways that powerful learning may help to form or transform teacher identity. Third, observing a pattern in the data and drawing on emerging literature on teacher agency (e.g., Priestley et al., 2015), I define teacher agency in professional learning as a multi-dimensional construct – agency over, during, and emerging from PD – and analyze the extent to which each dimension was evident in powerful and contrastingly negative professional learning experiences. I conclude that increasing dimensions of agency may be a promising lever for improving professional learning at both an individual and system level.

Finally, by privileging teachers’ unique perspectives and emphasizing the deeply subjective nature of learning, this thesis aims both to complement and complicate the existing research on PD design and effectiveness and the policy imperative for scale.

Looking back on the tenure of Andrés Alonso as CEO of the Baltimore City Public Schools and Michael Sarbanes as executive director of the district's new Office of Engagement, this teaching case examines the district's unique approach to family and community engagement. By drawing on an organizing frame that viewed community groups and families as partners rather than clients, City Schools was able to successfully pair community groups with schools, position schools as neighborhood hubs for reinvestment, and leverage a coalition of community groups to pass a $1.1 billion bond bill aimed at overhauling school facilities in varying states of disrepair. Using interviews and primary source data, the case reviews key milestones in the development and deployment of the strategy and poses questions about the sustainability of a community organizing approach within a bureaucratic system.

In Colombia, reducing levels of interpersonal and community violence is a key component of the country’s approach to citizenship education.  In this study, we use data collected during the 2005 Saber test of Citizenship Competencies to examine the relationship of school environments and individual students’ supportive attitudes toward violence among 97,971 students in 1,649 schools.  Using multi-level Tobit analysis with school random intercepts and regional fixed effects, we find that children taught in safe and participatory climates endorse attitudes less supportive of violence, with the effect of participatory climates almost double that of safe climates. Constructing a typology of four classroom environments, by crossing the two dimensions of safety and participation, we conclude that school environments that are safe and participatory lead to the least supportive attitudes toward violence, more than one standard deviation lower than unsafe and non-participatory school environments.  Implications, limitations and areas for future research are discussed.

Schools are increasingly seen as having a promising role to play in reducing adverse health and wellness outcomes among young people.  This paper uses a collaborative action research approach to examine the effects of one school’s efforts to change its students eating habits by implementing a “junk food free campus.”  By engaging school administrators and students in a six-month long process of joint research design and analysis, the author found that students understood but did not necessarily support the policy.  Despite students’ uneven support of the policy, however, there was some evidence that some students were developing healthier eating habits.  Moreover, student researchers reported developing greater perspective and respect for the policy as a result of studying it.

Effective peace education helps to create a transformation in the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and relationships of its students. Drawing on their experiences training teachers as part of Juegos de Paz, an education for peace program that received support from the Colombian National Program for Citizenship Competencies, the authors explore transformative peace education and identify four key lessons for practitioners. Data from focus groups, interviews, and personal reflections are used to illustrate these principles and lessons. Additionally, it is suggested that there may be some transferability of these principles across contexts, since the program studied was originally developed in North America for use in urban elementary schools and was successfully adapted for use in rural Colombia.

In this article, James Noonan uses portraiture to examine how the administrative team and the teachers at a small, urban middle school approach school improvement. He illustrates the ways in which the pressures associated with attempting school reform in our current high-accountability environment make it difficult for school personnel to engage in the deep learning that transformative change requires. Noonan finds that at Fields Middle School, district-initiated redesign is built around an expansive view of learning that embraces uncertainty, collaboration, and reflection as catalysts for broad and sustained school improvement. He illuminates school transformation efforts that hinge on adult learning and an understanding of schools as learning organizations, in contrast to reform efforts that adopt linear and hierarchical views of teaching and learning.

Noonan and Gardner suggest there are consequences to creative activity, which they call “post-creative developments.” They describe four types of post-creative-development roles: the Opportunist, portrayed through artist Shepard Fairey's famous Obama poster; the Reluctant Winner, exemplified by songwriter Gretchen Peters’ passive benefits from others’ misuse of her hit song “Independence Day”; the Unlucky Gambler, characterized by how Nazi-era German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's distortion of Nazi influence on her work undermined her own reputation; and theHostage, represented by how Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front went from instant international sensation to banned book. Noonan and Gardner conclude that creative individuals are not responsible solely for ideas, but are also responsible to ideas. This responsibility extends well beyond the moment at which individuals put their ideas into the world.