At the 2026 Association for Education Finance & Policy conference in Chicago, one theme stood out: Schools do not necessarily need more professional development. They need professional development teachers will actually use.

That message should sound familiar to many longtime NEE followers. NEE has written about aligning professional learning action steps with feedback paths, using mentoring to support teacher growth, and creating safer, growth-oriented spaces through peer observation. Those ideas are still right.

What the AEFP sessions added was sharper evidence about why some professional learning transfers into practice while so much of it does not.

Making Teacher PD Relevant and Usable

The strongest presentation on this issue came from the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET). The core argument was simple: PD is not effective just because it contains good content or because teachers attended. It is effective when teachers can actually apply it in their classrooms.

Teachers were reported to be 4 times more likely to apply professional learning when it included frequent individualized support from teacher-leaders and nearly 30 times more likely to apply it when it aligned with needs identified through evaluation. That is not a small difference. It is the difference between PD as an event and PD as changed practice.

That same NIET presentation also pointed to four features that make professional learning more usable:

  1. Teachers value individualized classroom support.
  2. They value alignment with their identified needs and existing systems.
  3. They respond better to local expertise (people who understand the context of their school and classrooms).
  4. PD becomes more workable when it happens during regular school hours, rather than being piled onto already overloaded schedules.

In other words, teachers do not just need information. They need relevance, follow-through, and conditions that make implementation possible.

This is exactly where NEE’s design matters. NEE’s EdHub library includes more than 500 professional learning modules, allowing leaders to connect observations and other data to more specific next steps rather than sending teachers to generic PD that may or may not fit their needs.

In the same way, NEE’s Teacher Professional Development Plan is meant to move professional learning away from a compliance exercise and toward a focused, data-informed growth process for each teacher.

Too often, professional development is treated as a delivery problem: choose a topic, schedule a session, make sure everyone attends, and hope for the best. But the findings presented at AEFP suggest the real issue is closer to a design problem. If professional learning is disconnected from a teacher’s actual classroom challenges, detached from observation and feedback, or offered without meaningful follow-up, it may check a box without changing much.

In a second research presentation, this point was confirmed from another angle: When curriculum, evaluation rubrics, and professional learning send mixed signals, teachers receive conflicting messages about what actually matters.

That concern also helps explain why the NEE feedback paths are important. One reason PD stalls is that teachers leave conferences or coaching meetings with broad advice but no manageable next move. NEE’s feedback paths and action steps push in the opposite direction, providing focus, individualized support, and concrete plans for practice.

Using Mentoring and Coaching in Teacher PD

Mentoring and coaching are not side topics; they are part of the mechanism that helps professional learning stick.

A study by researchers from the University of Virginia on novice teacher induction found formal mentor assignment was relatively common, but more intensive supports were much less common. Meeting time with mentors, release time to observe colleagues, and reduced workload all dropped off sharply. Less than 10 percent of novice teachers reported receiving all four supports together.

The implication is hard to ignore: Assigning a mentor is not the same thing as building a real support system. A school can say it values growth, but if a new teacher has no time to meet with a mentor, no chance to observe a colleague, and no protected space to practice and reflect, then the school is still asking that teacher to improve mostly on their own. That is not a serious professional learning system. It is an individual survival strategy dressed up as support.

Based on these findings, NEE’s peer observation tools become especially relevant. NEE’s POWERHub was built to support collegial observation, reflection, and teacher-led improvement while remaining separate from formal evaluation data. POWERHub helps teachers experiment, ask for help, and refine practice honestly. Using NEE’s peer observation tool, Bayless School District strengthened professional learning and mentoring in day-to-day school practice.

Work discussed by the University of Arizona and the Annenberg Institute further argued that coaching is promising, but the field still knows too little about what actually makes coaching effective at scale. Too much of the existing evidence relies on broad indicators, like hours or dosage.

The researchers argued the real action may be inside the coaching conversation itself: what gets discussed, how feedback is framed, how concrete data are used, and what kinds of interactions actually move teaching forward. The question is not just whether coaching exists. The question is whether the coaching is good enough, specific enough, and grounded enough to change practice.

Recommendations for Teacher PD

So what should principals, instructional leaders, and district leaders take from all of this?

  1. Start judging professional development by whether the learning is specific enough, supported enough, and relevant enough that teachers will actually use it. The NIET findings suggest individualized support and alignment to identified needs deserve much more attention than schools usually give them.
  2. Treat coaching and mentoring as part of the infrastructure that turns feedback into growth. If schools want better instructional improvement, they cannot rely only on occasional workshops or broad resource libraries. Teachers need human support, follow-up, and time. The University of Virginia findings suggest many systems still provide the label of support more consistently than the substance of support.
  3. Be careful about how you connect evaluation to professional learning. The AEFP discussions suggest alignment matters, but alignment should not become surveillance. When professional learning is closely tied to identified needs, it can become more useful and motivating. But when every growth conversation feels high-stakes or compliance-driven, schools can lose the trust that makes teachers willing to experiment, reflect, and improve.

If leaders want more return from professional development, they should ask fewer questions about volume and more questions about usability. Is the PD tied to something the teacher is already working on? Is there teacher-leader, mentor, or coach follow-up? Is there protected time? Does the support feel relevant in this classroom, with these students, in this school? If the answer to those questions is no, the school may be funding professional development without really building professional learning.

The most useful takeaway from AEFP 2026 may be this: Teachers are not rejecting growth. They are rejecting disconnected growth. And that is a leadership problem schools can actually solve.

Xintong Li is an experienced researcher specialized in quantitative methods and educational research. He joined the NEE team in 2018 as a senior research analyst. He received his PhD in Statistics, Measurement, and Evaluation in Education at the University of Missouri. He has publications in methodological foundations and applications and is skilled in advance statistical modeling, programming and large-scale simulations using high-performance computer clusters. His current research interests include causal inference using cross-sectional data and motivation in education.

The Network for Educator Effectiveness (NEE) is a simple yet powerful comprehensive system for educator evaluation that helps educators grow, students learn, and schools improve. Developed by preK-12 practitioners and experts at the University of Missouri, NEE brings together classroom observation, student feedback, teacher curriculum planning, and professional development as measures of effectiveness in a secure online portal designed to promote educator growth and development.