Questioning the consensus on effective professional development

Education systems around the world are committed to teacher professional development, both financially and rhetorically. In recent decades, one-off expert-driven forms of PD have largely been sidelined in favor of school-based, collaborative approaches. In this context, a new orthodoxy has emerged from a growing “consensus” on effective PD. We question whether the consensus obscures other forms of effective PD, using two widely accepted design elements—“centrality of content” and the “need for coaching”—to illustrate this point. We argue that the field has embraced the consensus prematurely and uncritically and call for greater theoretical sophistication and methodological rigor.