If you look closely, they’re actually not hard
to find: inexpensive professional development opportunities for teachers that
actually do make a real difference in student learning. Earlier this year, we
covered an experiment that demonstrated that teachers are remarkably more
empathic towards their students after completing just a brief 70-minute exercise. We also learned how pairing a highly skilled teacher with one
who is struggling, even absent a formal curriculum, turns out to be more
effective than a lot of higher priced PD models.
Now, we’re offered new evidence that spending
very little money giving teachers access to high-quality math lessons can yield
big pay offs.
In a white paper from the National Bureau of
Economic Research, Kirabo Jackson and Alexey Makarin describe a nice little
experiment in which 119 math teachers were given access to a library of
inquiry-based lesson plans that currently runs at a cost of $320 per teacher
for the year. Teachers also received a few occasional email reminders about the
availability of the resources and were reminded that they could collaborate on Edmodo with other teachers
also using the lessons. That was it.
The results were remarkable. By the end of the
year, the growth in student achievement among these teachers was on par with
far more costly efforts, such as reducing class size by 15 percent or replacing
an average-quality teacher with a great one.
A couple of interesting points:
First, it was the lowest performing teachers who
saw the greatest gains.
Second, there were some teachers in the
experiment who didn’t get the email reminders and, with that group, there were
no gains at all.
There are also some important caveats to this small study, including
a significant decrease in lesson downloads and usage over time, suggesting that
teachers did not themselves appreciate their value enough to implement more of
them.
You can check out the lessons used in the study on the Mathalicious website.
