About The Report

The Challenge: Transforming Teaching through Curriculum-Based Professional Learning

School board members, parents, education stakeholders, and all educators have a vested interest in the success of all students. And one thing they have witnessed firsthand is clearly supported by research: Curriculum has a direct impact on student engagement and learning. The instructional materials that teachers use with their students can dramatically accelerate or hamper learning.

Perhaps less obvious, yet even more important, is that the way in which teachers use curriculum matters too. This presents a unique opportunity to enhance the efforts of hard-working teachers: Provide them with strong, high-quality, standards-aligned curriculum and make sure they know how to take advantage of everything it has to offer. The question is, how?

While the research is clear on the characteristics of effective professional learning in general, it is limited in its attention to professional learning designed to support the implementation of high-quality instructional materials. This paper identifies and describes the elements of effective curriculum-based professional learning, including how these elements are being used to positively affect schools across the country. And it challenges school and system leaders, curriculum developers, and all specialists in professional learning to apply them.

Teachers need the highest quality professional learning to understand, practice, and transform teaching and student learning. The Elements of Curriculum-Based Professional Learning provides essential guidance for seizing these opportunities.

The Elements: Transforming Teaching through Curriculum-Based Professional Learning is a Challenge Paper from Carnegie Corporation of New York that explores how professional learning anchored in high-quality curriculum materials can allow teachers to experience instruction as their students will, change instructional practices, and lead to better student outcomes.

The goal of a Challenge Paper is to lift up ideas and issues in a way that will influence fields and the nation’s agenda. The subjects we deal with, along with the questions that we explore and the issues that we frame, grow out of our grantmaking work.