Why Professional Learning Sticks: The Research Behind Effective Sustainable Change

Educators in Hawaiʻi celebrate the end of an ACP professional learning experience.

For the last 13 years, I have been in the sphere of delivering professional learning to educators all across the world. When I was consulting for other companies, I noticed that when I went to a school and the workshop seemed transformative, nothing would be different six months later. But it didn’t sit quite as heavily with me then. It sort of felt above my pay grade to figure it out. It all started to hit differently when I started ACP.

I was no longer satisfied with just providing a one-off professional learning experience. I wanted it to lead to something more so that, ultimately, all learners could feel the impact of powerful constructivist teaching practices. I saw that transformation as a teacher and an instructional coach, but there was a disconnect happening when I was the one in front of the room delivering new pedagogies and teaching practices to teachers.

Being the historian that I am, I went back to my love of research and started piecing together a question that I think we are all struggling with across schools, districts, and the professional learning sphere:

Why does some professional learning lead to meaningful, lasting change while other professional learning disappears almost as soon as the workshop ends?

I am so thankful for research and researchers. Their work shapes so much of how we come to know what we know and believe what we believe. It is also important to recognize that, like humans, we grow and evolve. So with that, we have to be flexible enough to change our beliefs. Changing beliefs seems really scary. But our beliefs aren’t fixed truths. They are shaped by what we know, what we value, and what we have experienced. And as we learn more, they can change. It’s hard to change beliefs and opinions, but you know what helps: concrete research grounded in evidence and lived experience.

At ACP, a handful of researchers and ideas have fundamentally shaped how we think about professional learning, leadership, and sustainable school improvement. In this series, Research That Changed How We Lead, we’re digging into that research and, more importantly, exploring what it means when we move from research into real schools and classrooms. Ultimately, each piece helps us put another part of the puzzle together as we try to answer our big question: What does it really take to create change that lasts?

When a Good Workshop Isn’t Enough

Sharyl Lynn Fujii works alongside educators, helping make professional learning responsive to the people in the room.

Look, I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I know I am good at what I do. My professional learning days are always engaging. I know my stuff, and I am responsive to what teachers need in the room. I would see teachers collaborating, doing the hard work, and leaving genuinely excited to try something new. The end-of-workshop feedback survey was excellent, and it always seemed like the teachers were ready to take the next step. We all left energized from our time together.

It would all feel great until Monday came. I was off to my next place, and the demands on teachers would hit, and they would hit hard after missing a few days.

There were lessons to plan, learners who needed support, emails to answer, meetings to attend, assessments to grade, dealing with whatever was done or not done while a sub was in your classroom, and dozens of other priorities competing for attention. A few weeks later, that exciting new learning would move further and further into the background.

Sometimes the problem was everything that did, or didn't, happen after it.

It is tempting to look back and decide the professional development simply wasn’t effective. Sometimes that may have been true. But sometimes the workshop wasn’t the problem. I knew that was the case in a lot of my workshops. The energy and excitement were there. We all felt it. Sometimes the problem was everything that did, or didn’t, happen after it.

What Does the Research Tell Us About Effective Professional Learning?

In 2017, Linda Darling-Hammond, Maria E. Hyler, and Madelyn Gardner reviewed 35 methodologically in-depth studies that demonstrated a positive link between professional development, teaching practices, and student outcomes.

Their report, Effective Teacher Professional Development, identified seven common features of effective professional learning:

• a focus on content

• active learning

• collaboration

• models of effective practice

• coaching and expert support

• feedback and reflection

• sustained duration

Those findings matter and remind us that professional learning should look a lot more like the kind of learning we want educators to create for their learners. It seems simple in a way, yet we have all sat through “professional learning” that either tells us we need to change everything we are already doing, or traps us in a massive lecture that feels like it could have been an email. In many ways, good professional learning draws on the same constructivist teaching practices we want to see happening in classrooms.

Gina Olabuenaga, Ed.D., facilitates professional learning designed around the educators in the room.

At ACP, those ideas have become part of how we design learning. In our Quality Criteria for Professional Development, Gina Olabuenaga explores what high-quality adult learning looks like in practice. Our criteria draw on research, adult learning theory, constructivist practice, and decades of experience working with educators.

We think deeply about the learning experience itself. And honestly, we had that part down. We do it and do it well. But that’s only the first layer.

From a Professional Development Day to a Professional Learning Program

There is another finding in the Darling-Hammond research that is easy to acknowledge and much harder to actually build into schools: professional learning needs time.

Educators need opportunities to learn, practice, implement, receive feedback, reflect, and try again. That doesn’t fit neatly into a six-hour professional development day.

It is also why some skeptical or frustrated educators will come to a workshop already wondering whether this day will feel like a time waster. They have seen this song and dance before. They sit through a workshop; there isn’t any follow-up, and they are left wondering whether the time and money spent on that day could have been better used somewhere else, even on supplies for their classrooms. I don’t blame them for being frustrated. I once felt that way too.

Professional learning can’t end when the workshop does. Jacqueline Arce, Ed.D., follows up with her staff during a faculty meeting.

Jacqueline Arce tackled this challenge in her blog on Professional Development for Teachers: A School Leader’s Roadmap to Sustainable Programs.

Her challenge to leaders is simple but important: stop planning isolated professional development days and start planning professional learning as a program.

Her challenge to leaders is simple but important: stop planning isolated professional development days and start planning professional learning as a program.

As a leader herself, she has seen many initiatives come and go. Some were successful, and some were not. She learned that a workshop might introduce an idea, but as a leader she needed to help that idea take root beyond that single day. That meant intentionally deciding what should happen next. What happens at the next faculty meeting? In a PLC six weeks later? During coaching? When teachers begin implementing and encounter a problem they didn’t anticipate? When some educators are ready to deepen their practice while others still need foundational support?

Those moments are part of professional learning, too. And that brings us to an even bigger question.

What Has to Surround Professional Learning for It to Stick?

One of the most important pieces of the Darling-Hammond report actually comes after it describes effective professional development.

The researchers acknowledge that professional learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The conditions within schools and systems can either support effective professional learning or inhibit it. They point specifically to adequate resources, coherence across policies and practices, school culture, and responsiveness to the needs of educators and learners.

In other words: We can design an excellent professional learning experience and still fail to create the conditions necessary for that learning to become lasting practice.

We can design an excellent professional learning experience and still fail to create the conditions necessary for that learning to become lasting practice.

This distinction has become incredibly important in how we think about partnership at ACP, and I think it was the missing piece for me during so much of my time in the consulting world.

When a district brings us in to support project based learning, actionable assessment, empowered learning environments, social and emotional learning, or another area of instructional practice, we don’t want to begin and end with: What workshop should we provide? Here is our list. Choose one. I had seen professional learning become almost a check-the-box, out-of-the-box experience.

Amber Graeber, Ph.D., facilitates professional learning that gives educators time to learn, collaborate, and apply new ideas.

That’s not the ACP way. We have never run the same workshop twice. Sure, the foundation might be there, but every group of learners is different, which means we need to understand the larger picture before we decide exactly what the learning should look like.

So we partner with schools and districts to truly understand what they hope will change for learners and what is already in place to support that change. We also realize that educators have a lot on their plate, so understanding what other initiatives are competing for educators' time and attention is super important.

We can sometimes show how they all fit together as one coherent support plan, and other times you have to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that they don’t fit together at all.

We need to understand the structures that already exist for collaboration. One thing we hear from educators over and over is that they need more time. However, that is usually the one thing we can’t create. Instead, it's about using what already exists to support growth and making the most of the time educators already have.

Then we also need to figure out the support that Jacqueline talked about in her blog. We need to have an honest conversation about how prepared our leaders are to support the work. Many leaders want to be instructional leaders, but the realities of their roles pull them in a hundred other directions. Some have also never been given the support they need to really build that capacity. So, sometimes part of our job is helping them become the instructional leaders this work needs.

We also have to work alongside leaders to figure out what educators will need after their initial learning. Honestly, the first workshop is usually the easy one to get right. It goes amazingly. The workshops that come after it can actually be harder because it is so easy to make assumptions about what happened after we left. What did teachers actually try? Where did they struggle? What do they need now? If we don’t know those things, we can end up designing the next learning experience for a reality that doesn’t actually exist.

Tara Harvey coaches a teacher during implementation, providing the kind of follow-up support that helps professional learning become practice.

Teachers will need to receive feedback on their ideas, get coaching, and have a way to measure success so they can see whether implementation is making a difference. So determining what that looks like and how it will happen is super important if you want professional learning that sticks. And all of that can’t live solely with the outside company or consultant who was brought in. The internal system has to carry the work, too. Otherwise, it can quickly become another box that was checked.

Putting all of these pieces together has pushed us to think differently about sustainable implementation. We no longer see system support and educator support as two separate paths. They are part of the same journey, and lasting change requires us to pay attention to both along the way.

Building the System While Supporting the People

When it came to putting this all down on paper for ACP, we landed on five phases: Understand & Align, Build Conditions & Capacity, Design & Learn, Implement & Refine, and Deepen & Sustain for our Sustainable Implementation Roadmap

Some of the work within those phases is more focused on the system, and some is more focused on supporting educators as they learn and implement. But we put them on one roadmap because we really can’t separate the two. We need to keep asking: What does the system need to make this possible? And what do educators need in order to learn, implement, reflect, and grow?

For too long, I was only focused on the second question, and that helped me understand why I could come back after all that initial excitement and find that very little had changed.

I also want to be clear that we don’t think every school starts at number one and then works its way neatly through all five phases. That’s just not how change works.

Every place we go has its own history, its own strengths, and things that are already working. Schools might be working in a few phases at the same time, or they might need to go back to something they thought they had already figured out. That’s okay.

The roadmap helps us figure out what is needed, not prescribe where a school has to start. One school may already have strong collaborative structures but need support building leadership capacity. Another may have committed leadership but lack the coaching structures educators need during implementation. A third may have been engaged in the work for several years and now needs better ways to measure impact and determine what should come next.

And honestly, I think this is where a lot of educational consulting models get it wrong. Too often, the model asks a school or district to bend toward the provider’s way of doing things rather than the provider working alongside them to strengthen what is already there. Even a really strong, research-based framework shouldn’t require a district to abandon the systems, language, structures, or practices that are already working.

A successful partnership shouldn’t create dependence. It should build the capacity to no longer need us other than to say hi and celebrate their success

The district shouldn't have to become more like the professional learning provider for the partnership to work. Partnership means understanding that context before prescribing the solution. The best thing that an educational company can do is provide the tools, structures, and practices that build the capacity of the people already there, so that eventually, you can walk away because the school or district is strong enough to continue the work on its own.

A successful partnership shouldn’t create dependence. It should build the capacity to no longer need us other than to say hi and celebrate their success.

Kristy Lathrop facilitates an ACP workshop designed to make learning active, collaborative, and connected to practice.

Taking the Next Step

Want professional learning to actually stick?

ACP partners with schools and districts to build the conditions, leadership capacity, professional learning, and ongoing support needed to turn new learning into lasting practice.

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Professional Learning Is Only the Beginning

Darling-Hammond and colleagues gave the field an important research base for understanding what effective professional development looks like. For us, the research leads to an even larger leadership question: Have we created the conditions in which that learning can live?

High-quality professional learning matters, and a coherent professional learning plan matters. Did I not tell you that when you start diving into research, it leads you to more and more questions?  Welcome to my brain.

But if we want new learning to become sustained practice, we also have to think about the systems, structures, leadership, coaching, collaboration, feedback, and opportunities for continued learning that surround it.

Effective professional learning gives educators time to process, problem-solve, and learn from one another.

That’s the work that makes professional learning more than a singular event or just a series of individual events. It’s what helps learning become practice. And when I step back, I realize how closely this connects to two of ACP’s core values: Connection and Meaningful Work.

We believe that learning and relationships are made richer through connections. Professional learning works the same way. A workshop should connect to what educators already know, the systems around them, the people supporting them, and what comes next.

A great workshop isn’t the end goal. The goal is what happens because of it for the system we have been asked to support so that learners can thrive.

And ultimately, the work has to be meaningful. For us, that means it has to make a real impact on people and communities. A great workshop isn’t the end goal. The goal is what happens because of it for the system we have been asked to support so that learners can thrive.

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