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Editor’s Note: Every four years, the U.S. Department of Education designates sixteen Title VI centers across the country to support language teaching and learning. Professionals in Education Advancing Research and Language Learning (PEARLL) at the University of Maryland was recently designated a Title VI center.

PEARLL was founded out of the Co-Directors Rebecca Damari's and Thomas Sauer’s experiences delivering professional development at the National Foreign Language Center. PEARLL’s mission is to investigate best practices in teacher professional development. PEARLL defines best practices as a combination of teacher experience and research, which means opening and maintaining a dialogue between teachers and researchers.

There is a plethora of professional development opportunities available to educators, but little research on whether teachers make changes in their practices after participating in these opportunities. Even less research is available on whether those changes in practices result in improved student outcomes.

“What we want to know,” says Damari, “is whether professional development impacts teacher practice and, if it does, how it affects students.”

To find out, PEARLL will be working with teachers directly to research whether and to what extent they change their behavior in the classroom after participating in professional development, which will come in a variety of formats. PEARLL will also investigate whether that professional development results in improved student outcomes.

“Can you follow the professional development to the desk of a child?” Sauer asks. “If we can’t do that, we need to do something differently.”

PEARLL hopes to find out what models of professional development are most effective and share that information with the field. Join conversations with PEARLL through their Facebook page, Twitter, or email at pearll@nflc.umd.edu