Just how do teachers improve?

There is no one answer to how teachers improve. There is no one-size-fits-all intervention. There isn’t really even a need for it. If a teacher needs or want to improve, they only need to be given the agency and tools to make their own decision about what, how and when.

School districts and professional learning organizations really only need to set the conditions for and support the mindset of learning and improvement. Teachers, even the supposedly bad ones, are good at a lot of things. They know how to determine needs; they know how to find resources; and they know when authentic improvement has happened. All they really need to do is apply these skills to themselves. So many of them already do!

School districts could take the responsibility for enabling these professional learning opportunities. Over the last twenty years, teacher competency frameworks, training programs and workshops, and some external coaching and classroom practice frameworks, have all been developed with the goal of helping more teachers gain the knowledge and skills to provide all their students with the best possible education.

Many different approaches and strategies to teacher development have been tried. Except one. 

Simply provide teachers the agency, the tools and the expectation to develop themselves professionally. Then basically just get out of the way, or just monitor the improvement. Of course, this is what mme moe does.