For me, summer professional learning matters most when it gives educators something the regular school year rarely offers: sustained time to reflect, learn, and change practice. Educators understand that meaningful and effective professional growth does not occur in a single workshop or brief meeting. It requires a commitment to examine evidence, study student work, collaborate with colleagues, and make purposeful adjustments that improve classroom instruction.
I come to this work as a science educator, a former K-12 biology teacher, and a researcher whose scholarship centers culturally sustaining and creative instructional strategies in STEM education. My research asks how STEM and AI learning environments can become places where Black girls, including those who are twice exceptional, experience belonging, ownership, agency, and empowerment. That question shapes how I think about professional learning. Professional development is not only about giving educators new tools. At its best, it helps teachers design classrooms where students see themselves as capable thinkers, creators, problem-solvers, and leaders.
As an NSF CADRE alumna and Jhumki Basu Scholar, I have learned alongside researchers and practitioners who are asking how STEM education can become more inclusive, just, and responsive. I have also seen this work in international STEM identity development efforts, including the STEMBees Infinity Girls in Space Project, where young people were invited to cultivate and build their STEM identities. Those experiences reinforce for me that professional learning must help educators see identity development as part of instructional quality, not as an add-on to the real work of teaching.
Research increasingly shows that professional development (PD), when grounded in evidence-based practice (EBP), has the potential to lead to real improvements in how educators teach and, most importantly, how students learn. When professional development is thoughtful, sustained, and directly connected to classroom instruction, it can enhance teacher confidence, instructional skills, and student outcomes.
What does the research say?
Analysis of peer-reviewed studies has found seven features common in meaningful and effective professional learning. These features include content focus, active learning, collaboration, modeling of practice, coaching and support, feedback, and sustained duration.2,6 These conditions help educators improve their classroom practices in ways that benefit all students.
Professional learning systems also show that when PD is coherent, sustained, and embedded across roles,4 districts can achieve gains in student achievement, with some schools gaining the equivalent of about nine months of learning growth after implementing research-aligned PD systems.2,5,7 Quality PD can also significantly boost teacher self-efficacy,7 meaning teachers’ belief in their own ability to teach well. This belief is a strong predictor of whether educators implement new instructional practices with fidelity.1,3,5
Together, these findings reaffirm that summer professional learning, with its extended and concentrated time for educators to collaborate and reflect, provides an ideal context for engaging with evidence-based practices that truly influence classroom instruction.
Why this matters in STEM classrooms
In STEM classrooms, evidence-based professional learning is especially important because students are asked to wonder, test ideas, analyze patterns, revise explanations, collaborate, and imagine possibilities. These classrooms also send powerful messages about who belongs in science and who does not. Those messages can appear in curriculum, classroom discourse, participation patterns, examples used in lessons, and the ways students’ lived experiences are either connected to learning or ignored.
My scholarship on Black girls’ STEM identity development reminds me that students do not simply need access to STEM content. They need learning environments that affirm their identities, honor their questions, and recognize their knowledge as intellectually valuable. Evidence-based summer professional learning can help educators examine whose voices are centered, whose questions are treated as sophisticated, and whose experiences are built into the curriculum. It can also help teachers strengthen instruction while making learning more culturally sustaining and more responsive to the students in front of them.
What this looks like in classrooms
When educators engage in evidence-based professional learning over the summer, the impact can show up concretely in their classrooms throughout the school year. Through targeted instructional planning rooted in evidence, educators can focus on specific, research-supported instructional strategies, including formative assessment routines, deliberate practice, and real-world problem-solving, that are tied to improving student engagement and achievement.6
The utilization of grade-level and content teams to analyze student work, review relevant research, and plan lessons together based on evidence of what works creates collaboration with purpose. Through this shared decision-making process, educators build collective efficacy and coherence across classrooms. In STEM, this might mean designing investigations connected to community issues, using student questions to shape inquiry, or selecting examples that allow students to see science as connected to their lives and futures.
Through coaching, feedback, and reflection, educators can participate in ongoing coaching cycles where they try new strategies, receive feedback, and reflect on student responses.6 This cycle helps educators translate summer learning into everyday practice. Summer professional learning that builds self-efficacy allows educators to feel more capable of adapting evidence-based strategies to their unique classroom contexts. This is significant because higher self-efficacy is linked to greater willingness to innovate and sustain instructional changes.
For me, this is also about educator agency. When teachers are treated as reflective practitioners, they become more than consumers of ideas or scripted materials. They become professionals who ask critical questions about what works, why it works, and how it can be tailored to meet the needs of the students they serve. That kind of agency matters because equity work requires judgment, responsiveness, creativity, and trust in educators’ ability to know their students well.
This is why I believe summer professional learning should make room for both evidence and imagination. Teachers need time to study effective practices, but they also need time to consider how those practices will live in classrooms filled with students who bring different histories, abilities, questions, languages, and ways of knowing. For Black girls and other historically marginalized learners in STEM, that kind of intentionality can help shift the classroom from a place of participation to a place of belonging and ownership.
A call to make summer professional learning count
By grounding summer professional learning in evidence-based practice, school systems can move beyond a “one-off” or “one-size fits all” approach to professional learning and instead create experiences that measurably strengthen instruction and support student success. This work should also be culturally sustaining. It should ask educators to study research and also study their students, including students’ identities, interests, community knowledge, classroom experiences, and opportunities to belong.
For school and district leaders, the call to action is clear. Invest in professional learning that is sustained, evidence-based, collaborative, and connected to classroom practice. Give educators time to plan, rehearse, receive feedback, and return to the work. Most importantly, make summer professional learning a space where educators can prepare to build classrooms that are rigorous, affirming, and full of possibility. In STEM education, that means classrooms where historically marginalized learners, including Black girls and twice-exceptional students, are recognized not only as learners of science but as creators, innovators, and leaders.
References
1. Chu, E., McCarty, G., Gurny, M., Madhani, N., Golani, M., & Pisacone, J. (2022). Curriculum-based professional learning: The state of the field.
2. Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective teacher professional development. Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/effective-teacher-professional-development-report
3. Guskey, T. R. (2002). Professional development and teacher change. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 8(3), 381–391. https://doi.org/10.1080/135406002100000512
4. Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.
5. Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D., & Hogan, D. (2018). The effect of teacher coaching on instruction and achievement: A meta-analysis of the causal evidence. Review of Educational Research, 88(4), 547–588. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654318759268
6. Leading Educators. (2023). Transforming professional learning: How investments in educator development accelerate student learning. https://leadingeducators.org
7. Zhou, X., Shu, L., Xu, Z., & Padrón, Y. (2023). The effect of professional development on in-service STEM teachers’ self-efficacy: A meta-analysis of experimental studies. International Journal of STEM Education, 10(1), 37.
