Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Rethinking Professional Development for Teachers' Epistemic Beliefs and Instructional Practices

Beyond One-Size-Fits-All challenges the long-standing assumptions that professional development (PD) can be standardized, offering instead a bold reimagining of how teacher learning must be designed through the lens of personal epistemology-what educators believe about knowledge, learning, and teaching.

Grounded in original research and contemporary theory, this book reveals how teachers' epistemic beliefs powerfully shape their classroom practices-and why many professional development programs fail to change practice or deepen learning. Across ten chapters, Dr. Richard Montgomery, II explores the hidden cognitive filters that cause some educators to embrace innovation, while others resist new ideas, defaulting to rigid, absolutist worldviews that clash with evolving instructional paradigms.

Drawing on real-world data from urban school districts and current neuroscience, the book presents a practical framework for building epistemically-responsive PD, rooted in developmental theory and teacher cognition. It outlines how school leaders, instructional coaches, and policymakers can:

• Diagnose where educators fall on the epistemic belief spectrum (from absolutist to evaluativist)

• Design differentiated PD pathways that actually shift beliefs before introducing new instructional practices

• Understand why traditional compliance-based PD fails, and how to foster professional inquiry and internal motivation

• Build school-wide cultures that support belief transformation, reflective practice, and authentic engagement

Each chapter builds toward a strategic roadmap for school systems ready to embrace teacher development not as a training event, but as a belief-informed change process-one that honors the diversity of thought, teaching philosophy, and learning readiness among educators.

Why Teachers & Administrators Should Read This Book