Teacher professional development is essential to efforts to improve
our schools. This article maps the terrain of research on this im-
portant topic. It first provides an overview of what we have learned
as a field, about effective professional development programs and
their impact on teacher learning. It then suggests some important di-
rections and strategies for extending our knowledge into new terri-
tory of questions not yet explored.
E
ducational reform movements in the United States and
around the world are setting ambitious goals for student
learning. Many factors contribute to achieving these
goals. However, the changes in classroom practices demanded by
the reform visions ultimately rely on teachers (Fullan & Miles,
1992; Spillane, 1999). Changes of this magnitude will require a
great deal of learning on the part of teachers and will be difficult
to make without support and guidance (Ball & Cohen, 1999;
Putnam & Borko, 1997; Wilson & Berne, 1999).
This realization has led educational scholars and policy mak-
ers to demand professional development opportunities for teach-
ers—opportunities that will help them enhance their knowledge
and develop new instructional practices. As one example, the No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 requires that states en-
sure the availability of “high-quality” professional development
for all teachers. NCLB does not, however, address questions such
as what constitutes high-quality professional development or
how professional development should be made available to
teachers. Similarly, “Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action,” the re-
port released recently by The Teaching Commission (2004), re-
minds us that teaching is “our nation’s most valuable profession”
(p. 12), arguing forcefully that “helping our teachers to succeed
and enabling our children to learn is an investment in human
potential, one that is essential to guaranteeing America’s future
freedom and prosperity” (p. 11). The Commission proposed
a multifaceted approach to helping teachers succeed, one that
includes high standards for teacher classroom performance and
student achievement, and “ongoing and targeted professional de-
velopment” to help teachers meet the demanding new standards.
Again, little is said about the content and character of that pro-
fessional development.
Despite recognition of its importance, the professional devel-
opment currently available to teachers is woefully inadequate.
Each year, schools, districts, and the federal government spend
millions, if not billions, of dollars on in-service seminars and
Professional Development and Teacher Learning:
Mapping the Terrain
by Hilda Borko, University of Colorado, Boulder
other forms of professional development that are fragmented, in-
tellectually superficial, and do not take into account what we
know about how teachers learn (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Putnam
& Borko, 1997). Sykes (1996) characterized the inadequacy of
conventional professional development as “the most serious un-
solved problem for policy and practice in American education
today” (p. 465). The premise of this article is that it is a “serious
unsolved problem” for educational research as well.
Indeed, while the field of research on teacher learning is rela-
tively young, we have made a great deal of progress in the last 20
or so years. For example, we have evidence that professional de-
velopment can lead to improvements in instructional practices
and student learning. We are only beginning to learn, however,
about exactly what and how teachers learn from professional de-
velopment, or about the impact of teacher change on student
outcomes (Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, & Birman, 2002;
Fishman, Marx, Best, & Tal, 2003; Garet, Porter, Desimone,
Birman, & Yoon, 2001). We have a full research agenda ahead
of us to gather the information necessary to guide professional
development policy and practice.
This article and the AERA presidential address on which it is
based are intended to move us along that path by mapping the
terrain of research on teachers’ professional development. Two
major questions guide my analysis. The first focuses on the
known terrain: What do we know about professional develop-
ment programs and their impact on teacher learning? The second
proposes a route into unexplored territory: What are important
directions and strategies for extending our knowledge? My analy-
sis presumes a situative perspective on knowing and learning. I
begin by briefly describing that perspective. I then move on to
consider the two guiding questions.
A Situative Perspective on Teacher Learning
and Professional Development
Several years ago, Ralph Putnam and I used a situative perspec-
tive to interpret existing research on teacher learning and identify
Educational Researcher, Vol. 33, No. 8, pp. 3–15
3NOVEMBER 2004
An earlier version of this article was presented as the presidential address
at the 2004 annual meeting of the American Educational Research As-
sociation in San Diego, CA. I thank the many faculty and graduate stu-
dent colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who provided
comments on the presidential address. I am especially grateful to Karin
Kuffner for her assistance and support in preparing the presentation.
Special thanks go to Deborah Ball, Margaret Eisenhart, Jeff Frykholm,
Ralph Putnam, and Suzanne Wilson. Conversations about teacher pro-
fessional development with these colleagues and their critical feedback
on several drafts helped to clarify my thinking and enrich the ideas in
the article.

several issues for future investigation (Putnam & Borko, 2000). In
some sense, this article is an extension of that work. Again draw-
ing on a situative perspective, I consider what researchers have
learned about professional development programs and their im-
pact on teacher learning, identifying areas in which additional re-
search is needed and suggesting strategies for exploring those areas.
The term situative refers to a set of theoretical perspectives and
lines of research with roots in various disciplines including an-
thropology, sociology, and psychology. Situative theorists concep-
tualize learning as changes in participation in socially organized
activities, and individuals’ use of knowledge as an aspect of their
participation in social practices (e.g., Greeno, 2003; Lave &
Wenger, 1991). Several scholars have argued that learning has
both individual and sociocultural features, and have characterized
the learning process as one of enculturation and construction
(e.g., Cobb, 1994; Driver et al., 1994). As Cobb explained,
“learning should be viewed as both a process of active individual
construction and a process of enculturation into the . . . practices
of wider society” (p. 13).
Research in a situative tradition allows for multiple concep-
tual perspectives and multiple units of analysis. These multiple
perspectives provide powerful tools for understanding student
learning in classroom settings. Using psychological conceptual
frameworks and the individual as the unit of analysis, researchers
can study students’ activities as individuals and their evolving
knowledge and understanding. They can use sociocultural con-
ceptual frameworks and the group as the unit of analysis to exam-
ine the social context of the classroom and patterns of participation
in learning activities. Both perspectives are essential to under-
standing how students learn through participation in classroom
practices. The appropriate unit of analysis in any particular situ-
ation depends on one’s research purposes and questions (Bowers,
Cobb, & McClain, 1999; Cobb & Bowers, 1999; Greeno, 2003).
From a situative perspective, teacher learning “is usefully un-
derstood as a process of increasing participation in the practice
of teaching, and through this participation, a process of becom-
ing knowledgeable in and about teaching” (Adler, 2000, p. 37).
For teachers, learning occurs in many different aspects of prac-
tice, including their classrooms, their school communities, and
professional development courses or workshops. It can occur in
a brief hallway conversation with a colleague, or after school
when counseling a troubled child. To understand teacher learn-
ing, we must study it within these multiple contexts, taking into
account both the individual teacher-learners and the social sys-
tems in which they are participants. As in the case of student
learning, situative perspectives provide a powerful research tool,
enabling researchers to focus attention on individual teachers as
learners and on their participation in professional learning com-
munities (Putnam & Borko, 2000).
Mapping the Phases of Research on Teacher
Professional Development
Using the multiple conceptual perspectives and multiple units of
analysis of a situative perspective, I now turn to the questions
that are the foci of this article: What do we know about profes-
sional development programs and their impact on teacher learn-
ing? What are important directions and strategies for extending
our knowledge?
In thinking about these questions, it is helpful to identify the
key elements that make up any professional development system
(see Figure 1):
1
• The professional development program;
• The teachers, who are the learners in the system;
• The facilitator, who guides teachers as they construct new
knowledge and practices; and
• The context in which the professional development
occurs.
Educational scholars have studied these elements and the re-
lationships among them in a variety of ways. I have organized
programs of research into three phases, each building on the pre-
vious one. These phases represent one way in which research ac-
tivities can progress toward the goal of providing high-quality
professional development for all teachers.
Phase 1 research activities focus on an individual professional
development program at a single site. Researchers typically study
the professional development program, teachers as learners, and
the relationships between these two elements of the system. The
facilitator and context remain unstudied. In Phase 2, researchers
study a single professional development program enacted by more
than one facilitator at more than one site, exploring the rela-
tionships among facilitators, the professional development pro-
gram, and teachers as learners. In Phase 3, the research focus
broadens to comparing multiple professional development pro-
grams, each enacted at multiple sites. Researchers study the rela-
tionships among all four elements of a professional development
system: facilitator, professional development program, teachers
as learners, and context.
In the sections that follow, I examine the three phases in more
depth. Rather than exhaustively reviewing the literature relevant
to each phase, I draw upon research conducted on a small number
of high-quality professional development programs to illustrate
major themes and patterns of findings. (For more comprehensive
discussions of the research literature on teacher learning and pro-
fessional development, see Borko & Putnam, 1996; Putnam &
Borko, 1997; and Wilson & Berne, 1999).
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER4
Teachers
Facilitators
Context
PD
Program
FIGURE 1. Elements of a professional development system.