Does Teacher Professional Development Improve Student Learning? Evidence from Leading Educators’ Teacher Fellowship Model

Teachers are the most important school-specific factor in student learning. Yet, little evidence exists linking teacher professional learning programs and the various strategies or components that comprise them to student achievement. In this paper, we examine a teacher fellowship model for professional learning designed and implemented by Leading Educators, a national nonprofit organization that aims to bridge research and practice to improve instructional quality and accelerate learning across school systems. During the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, Leading Educators conducted its fellowship program for teachers and school leaders to provide educators ongoing, collaborative, job-embedded professional development and to improve student achievement. Relying on quasi-experimental methods, we find that a school’s participation in the fellowship model increased student proficiency rates in math and English language arts on state achievement exams. Further, student achievement benefitted from a more sustained duration of teacher participation in the fellowship model, and the impact on student achievement varied depending on the share of a school’s teachers who participated in the fellowship model and the extent to which teachers independently selected into the fellowship model or were appointed to participate by school leaders. Taken together, findings from this paper should inform professional learning organizations, schools, and policymakers on the design, implementation and impact of teacher professional learning.