What research says about why so much math professional development fails teachers — and the evidence-based framework to fix it.
Have you ever sat through a math PD session thinking, “This all sounds great… but what does it actually mean for my class tomorrow?”
Teachers are hungry for professional learning that respects their time and improves student outcomes. But too often, math PD stays stuck in big ideas, vague theory, and system messaging. When there’s no clear connection to curriculum, classrooms, or follow-up support, trust erodes and implementation stalls. Teachers leave thinking, “That was a waste of my day” — and they’re not wrong.
The real cost to the school and school district isn’t just wasted time. It’s that teachers stop believing professional learning is worth showing up for. And once that trust is gone, it’s hard to earn back.
This post draws on two complementary research frameworks to explain why so much PD fails and what leaders can do to design professional learning that actually moves instruction forward.
Why Good Intentions Aren’t Enough
Many math professional development sessions are designed by people who genuinely care about improving math instruction. The problem isn’t intent — it’s design. But not design in the PD itself solely — design in the system that surrounds the PD is essential. Let’s look at a few patterns show up again and again in ineffective PD:
The one-off session. A great speaker comes in, shares compelling ideas, and leaves. Teachers return to their classrooms alone, with no structure to practice what they heard, no colleagues to process it with, and no follow-up support. Research consistently shows that one-off PD, however well-delivered, results in roughly 10% of attendees actually implementing what they learned. The other 90% go back to doing what they were already doing. Joyce, B., & Showers, B. (2002)
The messaging broadcast. PD time gets used to share district decisions and communicate vision — essentially a live memo. While clarity of vision matters, using scarce professional learning time to broadcast information leaves no room for the actual learning that needs to happen. Teachers walk away informed but no more capable.
The theory-without-application problem. A PD session introduces a powerful idea — say, student discourse in mathematics — but never shows teachers where it fits inside the curriculum they’re actually using next week. Without that connection, even an inspiring idea feels like one more thing being added to an already full plate.
Each of these patterns shares a common flaw: they treat teachers as passive recipients of information rather than as professionals engaged in active, ongoing learning.
The Research Foundation: Four Principles That Matter
A landmark 2009 report from the National Staff Development Council (NSDC), Professional Learning in the Learning Profession, identified four essential characteristics of high-quality professional development. These principles have held up well in the years since, and they map clearly onto the most common failures in math PD today.
Principle 1: PD Should Be Intensive, Ongoing, and Connected to Practice
The word “ongoing” is doing a lot of work here, and it’s the piece most commonly missing. Professional development that is intensive but isolated — a powerful summer workshop with no follow-through — produces short-term enthusiasm and long-term stagnation. The learning has nowhere to go.
Ongoing doesn’t just mean “more sessions.” It means building a deliberate infrastructure of support between sessions: coaching cycles, PLC protocols, peer observation, and collaborative planning time that keep the learning alive and connected to what teachers are actually doing in classrooms. When leaders design PD with the next six months in mind — not just the next day — implementation rates jump dramatically. The research bears this out: pair intensive PD with ongoing coaching and collaborative structures, and you move from 10% implementation to somewhere closer to 80–90%.
The practical implication for leaders is clear: before finalizing your next PD session, map out what happens after. Name the structures that will carry the learning forward. If you can’t name them, teachers will notice the absence.
Principle 2: PD Should Focus on Student Learning and Address the Teaching of Specific Curriculum Content
This principle is often honored in spirit but violated in practice. A district identifies a high-leverage instructional strategy — problem-based learning, math talk, formative assessment — and designs PD around it. But the PD stays at the level of strategy, never descending into the specific curriculum materials teachers are actually using.
The result: teachers understand the idea in the abstract but can’t see where it lives in Tuesday’s lesson plan. For a teacher who is already stretched thin, that gap is too wide to cross on their own.
Effective PD makes the connection explicit. It asks: what does this strategy look like inside the unit we’re teaching right now? Where in this week’s lessons could a teacher try this? Grounding big ideas in specific curricular content transforms theory into something teachers can act on immediately. That’s the difference between PD that feels relevant and PD that feels like extra homework.
This also means that “one size fits all” delivery — a district-wide PD that tries to serve every grade level and every context simultaneously — often serves no one particularly well. There’s real value in thinking smaller: grade-band groups, school-specific sessions, or even unit-level planning time where the PD and the curriculum work are the same work.
Principle 3: PD Should Align With School Improvement Priorities and Goals
Professional development that arrives disconnected from the goals teachers are already working toward feels like noise. It competes with school improvement work rather than supporting it. Over time, teachers reasonably conclude that the district’s PD priorities and their school’s actual priorities have nothing to do with each other.
The fix is alignment — but real alignment, not the kind where the same language gets used at every level without genuine connection. Effective systems ensure that district leaders understand what schools are working on, and that school leaders understand where the district is headed. When those two things are true, a district-level PD day can be designed to illuminate the school improvement goal teachers are already pursuing, rather than distracting from it.
This bidirectionality matters. It’s not enough for the district to communicate its priorities downward and expect schools to incorporate them. District leaders need to be intimately aware of school-level work so they can help teachers see their own improvement goals inside the bigger ideas being presented. That connection is what makes professional learning feel coherent over time rather than like a series of unrelated initiatives. This is where a tool like a Math Coherence Compass can be essential.
Principle 4: PD Should Build Strong Working Relationships Among Teachers
This principle is the most overlooked in large-group PD — and the most consequential. Every professional learning session is an opportunity to either strengthen the collaborative relationships among teachers or to allow them to atrophy. One-way delivery, where someone at the front of the room presents while teachers sit and receive, doesn’t build relationships. It reinforces the isolation that makes teaching hard and change slow.
There’s also a deeper irony here that leaders can’t afford to ignore: when PD is delivered in a lecture format, it models the exact opposite of what we want happening in math classrooms. If we believe students learn through discourse, sense-making, and collaborative problem-solving, then teachers must experience professional learning the same way. The design of PD is itself a statement about what we believe learning looks like.
Building relationships through PD requires intentional structure: collaborative protocols, small-group discussions, time for teachers to share and analyze student work together, and a culture where it’s safe to say “I tried this and it didn’t work.” These conditions don’t emerge from good vibes — they have to be designed in.
Seven Elements of Effective PD: What the Research Confirms
The NSDC’s four principles are reinforced and expanded by a comprehensive 2017 research review from the Learning Policy Institute. Authors Linda Darling-Hammond, Maria E. Hyler, and Madelyn Gardner analyzed 35 methodologically rigorous studies — each demonstrating a positive link between teacher PD, teaching practices, and student outcomes — and identified seven hallmarks of effective professional development.
Together, these seven elements offer a practical design checklist for math leaders.
1. Content Focus
Thirty-one of the 35 studies featured a specific content focus — meaning the PD was explicitly tied to the discipline teachers teach, whether mathematics, science, or literacy. Generic pedagogical PD, divorced from content, consistently underperforms. When PD is designed around the specific mathematical ideas teachers are responsible for teaching, and the specific ways students tend to struggle with those ideas, it lands differently. It feels like support rather than an addition.
2. Active Learning
Thirty-four of 35 studies incorporated active learning. This means moving away from lecture-based models toward approaches that engage teachers directly in the practices they’re developing. In several high-performing studies, teachers engaged in the same tasks their students would later work through — solving the same problems, analyzing the same texts, working through the same investigations. This builds empathy for the student experience and gives teachers concrete, embodied knowledge of what they’re asking students to do. It also makes the implicit explicit: teachers discover the hard parts, the confusing transitions, the moments where students are likely to get stuck.
3. Collaboration
Thirty-two of 35 studies included meaningful collaboration. The research found that when teachers work together — in PLCs, study groups, lesson study cycles, or peer coaching — the impact extends beyond individual classrooms. Collaborative structures shift the culture of entire departments and schools. They create a collective sense of responsibility for student learning, reduce the isolation that makes change hard, and build the trust teachers need to take instructional risks. Collaboration is the mechanism through which a one-time PD idea gets tested, refined, and embedded into daily practice.
4. Models and Modeling
All 35 studies included curricular models or modeling of effective instruction. This is a straightforward but frequently skipped step: teachers need to see what good practice actually looks like before they can work toward it. Video cases of classroom teaching, demonstration lessons, sample student work, annotated lesson plans — these give teachers a concrete vision to anchor their learning. Abstract descriptions of effective teaching are no substitute. “Increase student discourse” means something specific when you’ve watched a video of a teacher doing it well. It means almost nothing when it’s only described.
5. Coaching and Expert Support
Thirty of 35 studies included some form of coaching or expert support. This is the bridge between what gets introduced in a PD session and what actually happens in classrooms. Without someone — a coach, an instructional leader, a department chair with built capacity — to support implementation in context, the gap between the PD room and the classroom is too wide for most teachers to cross alone. Coaching doesn’t have to mean one-on-one observation and feedback cycles, though that model has strong evidence behind it. It can also mean expert facilitation in collaborative planning, access to a knowledgeable colleague who can troubleshoot in real time, or structured peer observation protocols.
6. Feedback and Reflection
Thirty-four of 35 studies built in intentional time for feedback and reflection. Not as an afterthought at the end of the day, but as a structural feature of the learning design. Teachers need protected time to think about what they tried, what happened with students, and what they’d do differently. Without reflection, implementation stays shallow. Teachers try something once, it doesn’t go perfectly, and without a structured opportunity to process and adjust, the conclusion becomes “that doesn’t work for my students” rather than “here’s what I’d refine.” Reflection closes the loop between trying and learning.
7. Sustained Duration
None of the 35 effective PD models in this review was a single, isolated event. All of them spanned weeks, months, or years. A separate analysis of nine PD studies found that effective models averaged 49 hours of professional development per year, with an associated average student achievement gain of 21 percentile points. Duration matters not because more hours automatically produce better results, but because sustained engagement creates the time needed for practice, application, feedback, and refinement. Learning that changes teacher practice — the kind that eventually changes student outcomes — takes time to develop. It cannot be compressed into a single day, however excellent that day might be.
How the Frameworks Connect
When the NSDC’s four principles and Darling-Hammond’s seven elements are laid side by side, the convergence is striking. Both bodies of work are pointing at the same underlying truth from slightly different angles.
The NSDC’s emphasis on PD being “intensive, ongoing, and connected to practice” maps directly onto Darling-Hammond’s sustained duration, active learning, and feedback and reflection. The principle that PD should “focus on student learning and specific curriculum content” aligns with content focus and models and modeling. The call to “align with school improvement priorities” reflects the job-embedded, contextually grounded nature of effective PD. And the emphasis on “building strong working relationships” corresponds to collaboration and coaching and expert support.
Neither framework is describing a checklist of optional features. Both are describing what the research shows professional development must be to actually change what happens in classrooms. The implication for math leaders is direct: if your next PD session doesn’t incorporate most of these elements, you already know what the outcome is likely to be.
Seven Questions to Ask Before Your Next Math PD Session
Before finalizing any math professional learning session, work through these questions:
- What does support look like for the next six months? Name the structures — PLCs, coaching cycles, follow-up sessions — that will carry this learning forward. If you can’t name them, build them before you deliver the session – or build in tandom.
- Can teachers see this idea inside the specific curriculum they’re teaching right now? If not, create that connection explicitly. Don’t assume teachers will make it on their own.
- Does this PD align with the school improvement goals teachers are already working toward? If yes, say so out loud and help teachers see the connection. If no, ask whether this is the right PD for this moment.
- Are teachers learning in the same way we want students to learn? Review the agenda and find at least one place to replace passive delivery with a collaborative activity, discussion protocol, or hands-on task.
- Who are the bridges? Who will carry this learning into classrooms after the session ends? Name those people before the day is over and equip them to do that work.
- What is the one specific instructional move you want teachers to try before the next touchpoint? Narrow focus produces more implementation than broad coverage. Identify the one thing and make it concrete.
- When and how will teachers reflect on what happened? Schedule the follow-up moment before the session ends — the PLC agenda item, the coaching debrief, the five-minute check-in — so reflection is a structural guarantee, not a hopeful intention.
The Bottom Line
Teachers don’t stop trusting professional learning because they don’t want to grow. They stop trusting it because it has failed them too many times. It promised relevance and delivered theory. It promised ongoing support and delivered a single session. It promised collaborative learning and delivered a slide deck.
The research isn’t ambiguous. Whether you look at the NSDC’s 2009 principles or Darling-Hammond’s 2017 review of 35 rigorous studies, the answer is consistent: professional development that actually changes teaching practice and improves student outcomes is intensive, ongoing, curriculum-connected, collaborative, actively designed, supported by coaching, grounded in feedback, and sustained over time.
Designing PD this way is genuinely hard. It requires time, planning, and a willingness to prioritize depth over coverage. But the cost of not doing it well is paid by teachers who disengage from professional learning, and ultimately by students who never see the improved instruction that well-designed PD makes possible.
The good news is that the path forward is clear. It starts with asking better questions before your next PD day — and being honest about whether your answers are good enough.
Want to Learn More?
Want to put this into practice? Grab the free Math Coherence Compass Template to align your PD sessions at makemathmoments.com/coherence, or take the free assessment to identify what matters most in your math improvement plan at makemathmoments.com/grow.
