Effective Approaches to Professional Development

This month’s NPDCI web poll asks, “What type of professional development (PD) people most often experienced?” Early results show most respondents get their PD from one-time events: workshops, presentations and/or conferences. A much smaller percentage of respondents report participating in PD that tends to be more intensive and ongoing: e.g., consultation, coaching, and mentoring. Over half of the same persons participate in some type of Web-based training.

One key to effective PD is matching the type of professional development to the desired results. One-time events are a very common PD approach, and are useful for raising awareness and providing information. However, they are not effective for building skills. Intensive, ongoing, professional development that includes active learning and focuses on specific content over time is more effective for skill building. For more information on various approaches to professional development, we encourage you to review some of our recent site resources (see related below).