SBP: Collaborative Research: Improving Engagement with Professional Development Programs by Attending to Teachers' Psychosocial Experiences

As the U.S. student population grows more diverse, longstanding disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes persist. Efforts to remedy these disparities often use focused professional development (PD) to support educators in more effectively teaching diverse students. PD covers a wide array of topics, such as culturally responsive instruction, inclusive practices for students, and strategies for engaging students who have experienced adversity. What unites these diverse PD approaches is an intentional and explicit focus on understanding the issues facing students with diverse experiences and needs, and on equipping educators with skills to overcome these challenges and support student success. While focused PD is in high demand, little is known about its effectiveness. Many focused PD programs have little to no effect, and some may be counterproductive. For example, these programs can create a sense of psychological threat among educators, leading to feelings of being excluded, judged, or disadvantaged. These outcomes can result in resistance and backlash that undermine program goals. For focused PD to be successful, it needs to attend to educators' experiences. This project conducts studies that examine how three common sources of psychological threat in focused PDs (identity, culture, and pedagogy threats) shape how educators engage with and use focused PD content in their classrooms, and how this use improves students’ academic experiences and performance. Two studies use focus groups and survey designs to examine these issues among a national sample of educators who have participated in a wide variety of focused PD experiences. Three additional studies use randomized controlled experiments to test strategies for mitigating identity, culture, and pedagogy threats among educators. Together, this work provides insight for creating focused PD environments where all teachers feel valued, equipped to engage with challenging ideas, and capable of growing their classroom skills. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.