Teacher-led workshops and classroom visits outperform expert-led training for changing teaching practice.

Evidence

Turn teachers into workshop leaders. Teachers listen to other teachers. My colleague Heidi Watts found that the single most effective instrument for professional development is having teachers visit each other’s classrooms. When a teacher sees that another teacher can do something, she’s more willing to try it herself. If visits are not practical, then have teachers lead workshops. Once you’ve identified the teachers and community members who have classroom skills and charisma, get them on the team. We have teachers from our established sites do workshops for teachers from new sites. — David Sobel, Place-Based Education, 105

Categorization

• SEED: Directly actionable for the reader’s teacher-training course: peer modeling may beat outside-expert instruction.
• XREF: Parallels the law-merchant/trust material: within-community reputation and peer example carry more weight than external authority. — connects to: Short teacher trainings fail to produce durable environmental teaching proficiency — David Sobel, Place-Based Education: Connecting…, 103; Classroom visits are the most effective form of teacher professional development — David Sobel, Place-Based Education: Connecting…, 105; Effective teacher professional development requires repeated varied exposure and piggybacks onto existing structures. — David Sobel, Place-Based Education: Connecting…, 94 (+1 more)

Related

• Classroom visits are the most effective form of teacher professional development (similarity 0.90)
• Effective teacher professional development requires repeated varied exposure and piggybacks onto existing structures. (similarity 0.84)
• Teacher adoption requires repeated exposure across existing institutional settings (similarity 0.81)
• Short teacher trainings fail to produce durable environmental teaching proficiency (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Long-term integrated bias training changes behavior; short standalone workshops only shift knowledge. #corroborates (0.80) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1415