Common PD Traps

Hey 👋

It’s nice to be here with you. Let’s get to it…

Big idea 🍉

Getting better as a teacher is hard to do consistently. Teaching is complex, the link between teaching and learning is often fuzzy, and our habits can be stubbornly slow to shift.

The good news is that there’s now a strong and growing evidence base to help us steer towards impactful development, and away from three common traps:

1. The knowing-doing trap: Knowledge is the bedrock of expertise... but it only helps when it’s built in ways that make it usable in challenging classroom conditions. Otherwise, we end up with a knowing–doing gap, where understanding grows but practice (and student outcomes) don’t budge.

2. The discuss’n’reflect trap: Knowledge becomes actionable when teachers see it in practice (through modelling) and try it out repeatedly (through rehearsal with feedback). These experiences are far more powerful than reflection and discussion, even if the latter feel better in the moment. (though ideally, we want both)

3. The big-and-rare trap: Development works best when we focus on one small, concrete area of practice at a time. That’s why little-and-often (like fortnightly coaching) beats big-and-rare (like INSET days).

This is what makes approaches like Instructional Coaching and Group Rehearsal so powerful: they’re deliberately structured to avoid these traps, keeping the key mechanisms of teacher development front and centre.

These approaches aren’t easy to implement... far from it. But it’s better to do the hard work that delivers than the easy work that doesn’t. Otherwise, we risk not just low impact, but wasted time — and a slow erosion of faith in the promise of PD itself.

🎓 For more, check out this experimental comparison between little-and-often modelling+rehearsal vs big-and-rare discussion+reflection

Summary

• Helping teachers improve is complex, and easy to get wrong.

• To make it stick, avoid the three traps: knowing–doing, discuss’n’reflect, and big-and-rare.

• Instructional coaching and group rehearsal are examples of ways that PD can be packaged to avoid such traps.

Little updates 🥕

• Report on building teacher-student relationships via PD → argues that emphasising relational skills boosts student outcomes and teacher wellbeing

• Classroom study on effective spelling practice → finds interleaving boosts long-term retention (esp. for children with higher prior knowledge)

• Paper on an oral narrative intervention for children with language and reading difficulties → suggests it improves storytelling and supports reading comprehension (esp. for weaker decoders)

• Plus free ebook connecting neuroscience with education (HT Prof Hendy)

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