Teacher professional learning, teaching practice and student learning outcomes : important issues

What is the impact of teacher professional development on student learning outcomes? This is a critical question asked increasingly often by policy-makers, school leadership teams, teacher professional associations and many others with a stake in providing high quality teaching for all students. Recent work in the Teaching and Learning Research Group at the Australian Council for Educational Research has explored this critical question in a number of evaluation studies of teacher professional development. This chapter outlines some key research findings, and concludes that more is now understood about what constitutes effective professional development and about the links between such professional development, changes in teachers' knowledge and practice, and improved learning outcomes. This has implications for evaluations of teacher professional development programs; it also has implications for the timing of evaluation questionnaires and for the nature of information collected in those evaluations.