A considerable number of empirical studies have led researchers to identify key characteristics that indicate effective professional development (PD). However, few studies have attended to teacher perceptions of PD characteristics across international contexts. This article reported on an exploratory study utilising latent class analysis (LCA) to…

The concept of professional learning communities (PLCs) has received considerable attention in research as well as in school practice since the late 1990s. PLCs have been positively associated with a variety of outcomes for both teachers and students, but differences in the way the concept is operationalised, and the fact that most of the research…

Professional learning evaluators struggle to balance the pursuit of rigorous outcomes with the time and money that some effective measures entail. While many evaluations rely on surveys for their ease of administration and application, little research has explored how surveys can measure multiple constructs beyond participant satisfaction as part…

This study reports the outcomes of a survey investigating the beliefs and self-reported behaviours of a sample of 238 in-service school teachers in Italy and Spain concerning their self-regulated professional learning about the design of learning interventions, an activity generally referred to as Learning Design (LD). The study adopts the lens of…

This article describes the development process and provides psychometric properties of the Design-Based Professional Learning (DBPL) for Teachers Survey to measure teacher leaders' ratings of collaborative design and evidence-based work in their schools. Although there are other instruments that researchers could use to measure professional…

While research in teacher professional development (PD) has focused on numerous topics, not much is known about how teachers understand the notion of PD. Studying this topic is important because, for PD to be effective, all parties involved in its design and implementation need to have a common understanding of the scope and purposes of PD. We…

This article addresses the need for 'coherent, holistic frameworks offering insightful understandings as well as viable, connected and synergistic solutions to schools'. We describe a model which emerged from a research study developed in the context of a professional development course attended by more than 150 teachers from primary and secondary…

Drawing on 1508 US secondary teachers' data from Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013, this study examines new and veteran US teachers' needs, support, and barriers for professional development (PD). The results indicated that both veteran and new teachers reported needing PD that addresses implementation of national/state…

In this study, we investigated teachers' motivation to learn following in the footsteps of emergent research efforts in the field. This qualitative study was grounded in the intersection of four research fields: policy, educational psychology, andragogy and professional development (PD). Findings indicate that teachers' dissatisfactions with their…

The task of supporting beginning teachers has received considerable attention in recent years, and numerous initiatives have been implemented. In this article we investigate the experiences of early career teachers (ECTs) in New South Wales, Australia, at a time when their employing authority mandated the provision of mentors and a reduction in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of effective professional development and effective models of professional development as perceived by school teachers in the State of Qatar. This study is quantitative in nature and was conducted using a survey methodology. Means, standard deviations, t-test, and one-way analysis of…

In a context in which local authority support has been largely removed from schools in England, this article examines the needs of early career teachers (ECTs) in English schools and colleges, the extent to which these needs are met through professional development activities and the nature of that professional development. Quantitative and…

Shifts towards student-centred pedagogies require high-quality professional development to support teacher learning. Although many characteristics of effective professional development have been identified, such programmes still struggle to demonstrate successful results. This mixed-methods study investigated the development of student-centred…

This multiple-case study design with embedded units of analysis examined a two-year professional development (PD) program in which two rural districts received at least 90 hours of PD. This PD was provided through an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant that the United States Department of Education awarded to the National Writing Project. Two of…

An evaluation of the effectiveness of a large-scale professional development (PD) programme delivered to 258 schools in Queensland, Australia is presented. Formal evaluations were conducted at two stages during the programme using a tool developed from Desimone's five core features of effective PD. Descriptive statistics of 38 questions and…