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In the online forums section of teachermagazine.org, we recently asked readers to describe how they would improve professional development in their schools. Here are some of the responses:

A gifted education specialist explains how to energize professional development while minding your budget.

Effective professional development walks that fine line between satisfying the teachers and satisfying building-level, district-level, state-level, or national-level expectations of what teachers need to be learning. If we focus solely on what teachers request, some important topics could be overlooked. But if we focus solely on fulfilling bureaucratic expectations, the teachers can become a less-than-receptive audience.

My district has implemented a few strategies in recent years that have proven to be very effective. Perhaps some of these ideas could work in your location as well. • Give teachers a role in planning

An alternative-certification program that recruits math teachers believes educators could learn a thing or two about classroom management from stand-up comics.

To help its teachers develop that knack, Math for America is offering its New York City fellows after-school improv comedy classes taught by Rachel Hamilton, an alum of Second City, the Chicago-based troupe that launched the careers of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Amy Poehler, among others.

"The drive behind all of our PD, whether it's the driest high-level math presentation or improv comedy, is to emphasize how this is going to be applied in the classroom so that your students are successful in the classroom and in the workforce,' Umphrey said.

“We learned the lesson long ago that merely assigning teachers to teams does not mean that educator and student performance improves,”

“Educators committed to learning teams will benefit most from protocols that prioritize identifying and addressing learning goals for educators based on an assessment of student needs as part of the team cycle of improvement.”