This post originally appeared on Quill and the Classroom.
Imagine taking your child to a pediatrician who proudly announces that she spent the last six months studying your child’s medical chart. She knows every vaccination, medication, and allergy, and even some of your child’s fears and favorite things. You’d be thrilled—until she also mentions that she barely remembers medical school. Most of us would run for the door.
Of course, the opposite isn’t much better. A pediatrician who aced med school and built deep expertise in medical literature , but doesn’t ask questions and pays no attention to your child’s history, is also likely to miss important details that shape care in serious ways.
Doctors need both kinds of knowledge: general knowledge about medicine and specific knowledge about the patient in their exam room. The best care happens when a doctor accurately applies their hard-won expertise in medical research and standards of care to meet the particular needs of an individual patient.
Sound familiar? That’s what we want from teachers, too: to effectively implement research-backed instructional practices that meet the needs of their students. The right lessons and the right supports, at the right time.
Yet when it comes to teacher training, school systems and teacher preparation programs tend to focus on just one type of knowledge, or the other.
PD’s Big Problem
Economists have spent decades studying a question that should sound familiar to anyone responsible for professional development: What kinds of training create value for organizations and the people who work in them? One of the pioneers in this area was Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker, who distinguished between two broad categories of training: general training and specific training (or “firm-specific” training).
General training, sometimes called “portable skills” training, develops knowledge and skills that a worker can use almost anywhere. An accountant who learns the principles of financial analysis or a software engineer who learns a common programming language can take those skills to another organization.
For teachers, general training includes understanding how children learn to read, the relationship between knowledge and comprehension, retrieval practice, and what cognitive science tells us about learning. These ideas matter whether you teach in Colorado, Texas, or New York.
Firm-specific training develops knowledge tied to a particular workplace, system, or set of tools. Learning a company’s internal processes creates value, but primarily within that organization.
For teachers, it includes learning to implement a district’s adopted curriculum, navigate specific lesson materials, understand principals’ pacing expectations, and use local assessment systems. This can be important information, but it’s not necessarily portable.
These types of trainings complement one another—but only when they have the chance to coexist, and too often, they don’t. This disconnect warrants serious consideration: Teacher professional development has been in the crosshairs for a decade, when TNTP’s The Mirage studied more than 10,000 teachers and found no consistent benefits from professional development, raising big questions about whether our annual multibillion-dollar investment in PD is effective.
I think we need to think differently about PD. Instead of asking whether professional development works, what if we asked what kind of expertise do we want teachers to build? What knowledge and experiences do they need to get there?
Two PD Camps
Consider these common scenarios.
In one camp, systems invest heavily in theory and conceptual learning. An estimated one in three U.S. teachers has completed LETRS training so far, where they spend hours learning about the Science of Reading, cognitive science, structured literacy, or evidence-based practices. The sessions are often engaging, and teachers leave informed, inspired, and convinced by the ideas.
Then Monday arrives, and teachers return to classrooms filled with specific curriculum materials, pacing guides, and students who need instruction right now. Sometimes those materials are fairly aligned to what they’ve learned (and sometimes not)—but the connections aren’t obvious. The question is no longer What is the Science of Reading? The question is How do I teach tomorrow’s lesson?
In the other camp, systems focus almost exclusively on curriculum implementation. Teachers learn a curriculum’s routines and pacing. They discuss and come to know well what lesson comes next and what materials to use in their classroom.
But when instruction becomes disconnected from the underlying research, implementation can become mechanical. Teachers may know what to do without fully understanding why they are doing it. When students struggle, teachers don’t have the conceptual knowledge they need to diagnose problems and make informed decisions.
Just as a pediatrician needs both medical knowledge and an understanding of a specific patient, teachers need both a deep understanding of how reading develops and practical expertise with their instructional materials. Research suggests this has been a persistent challenge: even as states and districts have invested heavily in Science of Reading training, surveys show that while many teachers report learning valuable information, translating that knowledge into day-to-day classroom practice is often harder than expected.
That’s because the most effective professional learning doesn’t choose between theory and application. It deliberately connects the two.
Case Study: Reading 360 in Tennessee
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to help design and facilitate professional learning as part of Tennessee’s Reading 360 initiative. Our design team constructed a literacy training model that was built around connecting general and specific training.
The first component focused on conceptual knowledge. Teachers learned about the research behind reading development, including phonemic awareness, phonics, language comprehension, and the growing body of evidence now broadly referred to as the Science of Reading. Teachers were expected to understand not just what they were being asked to do, but why.
In the second part of the training, teachers met in clusters by district and spent substantial time working directly with the exact curriculum they would be using in their classrooms. We practiced lessons and rehearsed instructional routines with colleagues. We discussed how the research teachers had learned was showing up in actual units, texts, and lessons.
In other words, we didn’t simply tell teachers, “Here is the Science of Reading. Now go implement it.” Nor did we simply tell them, “Follow these curriculum directions with fidelity.” Instead, we spent our time at the intersection of theory and practice.
Teachers were constantly asked to connect the research to the materials in front of them. Why was this lesson designed this way? What concept was this routine supporting? How did this text set contribute to building knowledge? What should a teacher look for if students struggle? The goal was to build both general and specific expertise, equipping teachers to meet the real-world challenges of helping students learn to read and write.
The results were encouraging. Since 2021, more than 30,000 Tennessee educators have participated in Reading 360 training, and 97 percent reported feeling equipped to apply what they learned. Classroom observations and early student outcome data suggested that teachers were doing just that. The success of the training wasn’t simply that it taught teachers the Science of Reading. It was that it taught teachers how to enact that knowledge through the materials and instructional decisions they faced every day.
Where We Go From Here
As districts, states, and professional learning providers plan for the coming school year, I hope we stop treating pedagogical knowledge and curriculum implementation as separate endeavors. Too often, we invest in one while neglecting the other. As training in the Science of Learning becomes increasingly popular, we should be careful not to separate those insights from the curriculum and instructional materials teachers actually use.
Otherwise, we send teachers to workshops full of powerful ideas—but then leave them without tools to figure out how those ideas connect to tomorrow’s lesson. Or we focus so heavily on implementation that we unintentionally reduce teaching to a series of routines disconnected from the underlying research.
Neither approach gives teachers what they deserve, which is to understand how children learn. Teachers deserve access to the growing body of research on reading, learning, memory, and instruction. They also deserve meaningful support in translating that knowledge into the materials, lessons, and decisions that shape students’ daily experiences.
More than a decade after The Mirage, the way forward is clear. The highest return on investment does not come from theory alone, or from implementation of curriculum alone. Teachers will get the professional development they deserve when we connect the two.
