Recently I had the opportunity to present a webinar for Education Week on creating effective teacher professional development in a challenging economy. During the webinar, I presented ten suggestions to guide your decision making and help you get more value from professional development resources. I want to summarize them here, so I'll post five of them now, and the others next week.

1. Focus on students
Higher expectations for student performance and more rigorous accountability standards have shifted the focus of professional development from what teachers want to what students need. Every planning group needs to begin the process with the same two questions: What do our students need to know and be able to do, and how well are they achieving our expectations? With these questions answered, we can turn our attention to the knowledge and skills principals and teachers need to promote student success, and identifying the professional development that will help administrators and teachers develop that knowledge and those skills. We cannot afford to expend resources on efforts unrelated to student achievement. Once we focus all our efforts on students, we will increase the impact of professional development and lose interest in returning to past practices.
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2. Target specific teacher groups
Tough economic times may require us to focus selected resources on particular groups of teachers, including:

• Those who work with our most vulnerable students;
• Teachers who are new to the profession and who need support to accelerate their competency and efficacy; and
• Teachers who changed teaching assignments from the previous year.

While everyone can benefit from professional development, our efforts may have to focus on serving those teachers and students for whom professional development is most essential.
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3. Reorder your priorities
Hone your school-wide improvement efforts to your highest priorities. Lean times provide an opportunity to break out of unproductive patterns of professional development decision making and target professional learning for maximum effect. Too often schools use "school imprvovement" to keep people busy with aactivities that are not tied directly to improving instruction for students. We can use fewer resources as our reason to reexamine our school improvement priorities. Lay everything out on the table, and determine criteria for prioritizing initiatives. Then choose the two or three that are most important. This process should produce focus, build commitment, and increase results.

4. Invest in proven strategies
In times of economic uncertainty, we must limit professional development to teacher learning experiences that research and/or experience indicate will increase student learning. Now is not the time to experiment with this year's new thing. We must invest in proven strategies that address specific needs. We know that not all professional development is created equal; of 496 middle level professional development programs studied by NSDC in 2001, 5%, could provide research documenting the impact of the program on educator practice and student learning (see What works in the middle: Results-based staff development). Once educators diagnose their challenges and begin the search for solutions, they must examine the research base behind each potential solution. Studying the research base of a particular program can be tricky, however, as you need to not only look at the findings, but also consider the context in which the program was implemented. You must be confident that you can attain similar results in your setting.
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5. Invest in follow-up ﾠ
Most of us have heard the phrase training without follow-up is malpractice. When teachers attend workshops, most will implement less than 10% of the material covered. If we want higher levels of implementation, we need to focus efforts on what happens after the workshop. We need to support workshop attendance with schoolwide and team meetings to discuss implementation challenges and promote reflection; provide model teaching and peer coaching to support full-scale implementation; focus classroom walkthroughs on new learning strategies; collect data, display data, and discuss data; and celebrate progress and results. Expect no less from each initiative.

Next week we'll explore the other five items on the list.

Stephanie Hirsh is Executive Director of the National Staff Development Council.