Professional development programs are based on different theories of how students learn and different theories of how teachers learn. Reviewers often sort programs according to design features such as program duration, intensity, or the use of specific techniques such as coaches or online lessons, but these categories do not illuminate the programs’ underlying purpose or premises about teaching and teacher learning. This review sorts programs according to their underlying theories of action, which include (a) a main idea that teachers should learn and (b) a strategy for helping teachers enact that idea within their own ongoing systems of practice. Using rigorous research design standards, the review identifies 28 studies. Because studies differ in multiple ways, the review presents program effects graphically rather than statistically. Visual patterns suggest that many popular design features are not associated with program effectiveness. Furthermore, different main ideas are not differentially effective. However, the pedagogies used to facilitate enactment differ in their effectiveness. Finally, the review addresses the question of research design for studies of professional development and suggests that some widely favored research designs might adversely affect study outcomes.

Social psychologists are persuaded that researchers as well as laymen tend to overestimate the influence of personal traits and underestimate the influence of situations on observed behavior. The author of this article suggests that education researchers and policy makers may be overestimating the role of personal qualities in their quest to understand teaching quality. In their effort to understand classroomto-classroom differences in student learning, they may focus too much on the characteristics of teachers themselves, overlooking situational factors that may have a strong bearing on the quality of the teaching practices we see. The author reviews some of these situational forces.

Although studies of single cases occur throughout research fields, they are only recently beginning to appear in evaluation. These studies are difficult to generalize from, because statistical techniques do not apply. This article offers a variety of suggestions for logically analyzing the relationship between a single case and a population so that reasonable generalizations may be possible. Methodologies used by clinicians and by court justices are also examined for their relevance to evaluation methodology.

Teacher education programs typically teach novices about one part of teaching at a time. We might offer courses on different topics—cultural foundations, learning theory, or classroom management—or we may parse teaching practice itself into a set of discrete techniques, such as core teaching practices, that can be taught individually. Missing from our courses is attention to the ultimate purpose of these discrete parts—how specific concepts can help teachers achieve their goals, or how specific procedures can help them achieve their goals. Because we are now shifting from a focus on bodies of knowledge to a focus on depictions of practice, this article examines our efforts to parse teaching practice into lists of discrete procedures. It argues that we need to pay less attention to the visible behaviors of teaching and more attention to the purposes that are served by those behaviors. As a way to begin a conversation about parsing teachers’ purposes, I offer a proposal for conceptualizing teaching as a practice that entails five persistent problems, each of which presents a difficult challenge to teachers, and all of which compete for teachers’ attention. Viewed in this way, the role of teacher education is not to offer solutions to these problems, but instead to help novices learn to analyze these problems and to evaluate alternative courses of action for how well they address these problems.

This article reviews four hypotheses that have been put forward to account for a perceived lack of connection between research and practice: (a) research needs to be more authoritative, (b) research needs to be more relevant, (c) research needs to be more accessible, and (d) the education system itself is inherently too stable or too unstable and therefore unable to respond coherently to research findings. A brief history of thought within each of these hypotheses is offered, and the place of education researchers in the larger education context is discussed.