More than 900 licensed educators and hundreds of paraeducators in the Lawrence school district will head to class Tuesday, giving their more than 11,000 students a longer holiday weekend.

Some parents may be frustrated by the students’ additional time off school, but administrators maintain that the time set aside for training and collaboration — better known by its collective label: professional development — produces better teaching, higher test scores and improved performance by pupils and their educators.

“Teachers can share with each other what works well and capitalize on the successes that are happening in all our schools,” said Kim Bodensteiner, the district’s chief academic officer. Teachers are doing great things in all our schools and they need time to learn from one another.”

The district’s Professional Development Day on Tuesday is the one day a year assigned for all teachers, librarians, counselors, paraeducators and others involved in direct education to gather based on their respective school levels — elementary, middle and high school — to receive training about curriculum changes and practices, and to share their own ideas about what works and what doesn’t.

Specifically:

• Teachers in middle and high schools will learn how to use the district’s new “data warehouse” system, a Internet-based computer program designed to let educators track educational performance by student. An eighth-grade teacher, for example, could look at a particular student’s scores on assessment tests for each of the past five years and check for patterns on what might be mastered or missed — proficiency in basic math concepts, for example, and deficiencies in dealing with decimals or fractions. The goal is to identify opportunities and needs so that advanced students move ahead faster and students who may be lagging catch up sooner.

• All teachers will review the district’s “instructional framework,” to see that teachers understand the research-based process for developing lesson plans — from building upon what students already know, to monitoring performance as they move along, to practicing components as they are taught, and to connecting new knowledge to the concept or skill that will come next.

Schools will be closed during the daylong training. Elementary teachers will start the day in their own schools, then gather at Free State High School for afternoon sessions; educators from middle and high schools will meet at Free State in the morning, then take part in sessions at their own schools in the afternoon.

The district has one such day for districtwide professional development, plus another five days throughout the year for such training at the school level. All district schools have early dismissal on Wednesdays, to give educators 1.5 hours a week for “collaboration time” to meet with one another within their own schools to plan and otherwise work together on providing consistent, focused teaching.

In all, such collaboration and professional development activities amount to about 5 percent of the time students spend in class throughout the year.