"I need time for practice" — three words that should reshape every PD
We asked 60 K-12 teachers what they needed from integrated STEM professional development. The answer came through with remarkable consistency, across three different cohorts, over multiple years: “I need time for practice.”
Not more content. Not better technology. Not new standards frameworks. Time. Time to practice the activities themselves. Time to adapt them for their classrooms. Time to fail, revise, and try again before they were expected to teach the material to students.
This finding — documented in a peer-reviewed study involving three cohorts of pre-collegiate teachers — reshaped how we design every professional development experience.
The full study is open access: Burrows, A.C., Borowczak, M., Myers, A., Schwortz, A.C., & McKim, C. (2021). Integrated STEM for Teacher Professional Learning and Development: “I Need Time for Practice.” Education Sciences, 11(1), 21.
The study
The study compared three integrated STEM professional development experiences framed in astronomy, each using different delivery structures and timelines. Sixty pre-collegiate teachers participated across the three cohorts. We collected both quantitative and qualitative data on content knowledge, pedagogical practices, and teacher perceptions.
The quantitative results were consistent with the broader PD literature: teachers showed gains in content knowledge and self-efficacy. But the qualitative data — the interviews, the open-ended survey responses, the informal conversations — told a more specific story.
Teachers repeatedly identified the gap between understanding a concept and being ready to teach it. That gap was not filled by more information. It was filled by practice — the kind of deliberate, supported, iterative practice that requires time the PD schedule often does not provide.
What “time for practice” actually means
When teachers said “time for practice,” they meant three distinct things:
Time to do the activity as a learner. Before teachers can facilitate a hands-on STEM activity for students, they need to experience it themselves — making mistakes, encountering confusion, working through problems. Watching a demonstration is not the same. Reading instructions is not the same. The embodied experience of doing the work is the foundation that confidence is built on.
Time to adapt. A PD activity designed for the workshop context almost never transfers directly to a specific classroom. A fifth-grade teacher needs to modify the vocabulary, adjust the timing, align to her standards, and account for her students’ prior knowledge. That adaptation work requires dedicated time within the PD itself — not “homework” to be done later.
Time to fail safely. Teachers are professionals who are accustomed to performing competently in front of students. Asking them to try something new — programming a micro:bit, running a computational model, facilitating a cybersecurity simulation — means asking them to be visibly uncertain. That is uncomfortable. The PD needs enough time for teachers to move through the discomfort and reach a level of competence that they feel ready to demonstrate in front of their own students.
How it changed our design
Since this study, every PD engagement we design allocates at least 40% of the total time to structured practice. Not free time. Not “work on your own.” Structured practice — with facilitator support, peer collaboration in groups of three or more, and clear goals for what the practice session should produce.
We also stopped scheduling content for the final session of any PD day. The final session is now always an adaptation block — time for teachers to take the day’s content and reshape it for their specific classroom context. The deliverable at the end of the day is not “I learned this” but “I designed this and I am ready to teach it.”
The trade-off is coverage. We teach fewer topics per PD day than many competing providers. We are comfortable with that trade-off because the research is clear: depth with practice beats breadth without it.
The implication for districts
When you evaluate PD proposals for your district, look at the schedule. Count the hours allocated to teacher practice versus presenter delivery. If the ratio favors delivery, the design is optimized for the presenter’s content, not for the teacher’s learning.
Teachers need time for practice. They told us. The data confirmed it. The question is whether the PD gives it to them.