Effective professional learning has a significant impact on pupil achievement (TDT, 2015) and leading professional development is the school leadership activity that has the largest impact on pupil outcomes (CUREE, 2009).
Not only that, but with pressure on staff recruitment and retention, it becomes increasingly important to have a culture that allows for great development and a supportive environment that can reduce staff turnover, improve morale and reduce stress.
Yet with increasing tightening of school budgets, it is more important than ever to justify all areas of spending. CPD is no exception and has traditionally been a hard area to show impact. Looking at your CPD provision, where do you start with evaluation? Thomas Guskey’s Evaluating Professional Development (3) breaks down evaluation of CPD to five different levels which can help structure your thinking...
1 Participants’ reaction
This tells you how colleagues initially respond to a professional learning activity. It might include whether the content felt relevant, whether the delivery was effective or just whether they enjoyed the experience. This is often collected through surveys at the end of sessions. Tools such as Google surveys and various school improvement online resources can support this.
2 Participants’ learning
This tells you whether colleagues have learnt any new knowledge or understanding and what that new knowledge or understanding is. This might be something that colleagues reflect on themselves, share with each other, or perhaps write up and record. Line management or team meetings might be a vehicle to support this.
3 Organisation and support
This level examines the impact on the organisation and whether the organisation supported the implementation of any new learning. Is there any evidence that new learning is embedded in habits and policies? Is the organisational support in place to maintain the learning? Did the learning have sufficient resources and was there enough time? This might be apparent through staff feedback, in meetings or through school plans. Tools such as the TDT Network’s CPD Audit looks at organisational support for effective CPD in schools.
4 Participants’ use of new knowledge and skills
Are teachers then using any new knowledge or understanding they have learnt? This gives you a sense of how well implemented the professional learning has been. It might be evident in lesson observations and feedback from staff through surveys or conversations. Low-stakes learning walks, line management meetings, peer observations such as Lesson Study can all support this and online performance management tools can also include self-evaluation tools to help teachers reflect on this.
5 Pupil learning outcomes
Finally, has there been an impact on pupils? This could be any outcome – attainment, progress, behavioural or attitudinal, depending on what need your CPD was planned to address. This could be measured using test data, pupil work, homework, questionnaires or observation or video. Processes such as collaborative enquiry or Lesson Study can also support teachers in evaluating and measuring this.
Taking all five together
These five levels can help you break down what need you are addressing and what impact you are evaluating. Guskey also points out that all levels are important and should be considered. Recently there has been a big move to dismiss “happy sheets” that only inform you of participants’ reactions. However, if you do not consider the delivery of professional learning, or how it is received, if it goes badly then the impact may be significantly reduced.
Equally, it is important to consider staff perception, as that forms a key part of the culture, the buy-in and the morale within an organisation.
In addition, Guskey also points out that all five levels depend on one another and build on the level before. For example, if there is poor delivery, there will be no change in teachers’ learning, or if there are organisational barriers to staff implementing new learning, there will be no change in their practice and if there’s no change in their practice there is unlikely to be an impact on pupil learning. This is another key reason why each level should be considered and planned for.
Finally, these levels of evaluation are really useful not only for planning evaluation, but also for planning your CPD.
Know what need you are addressing
The most important aspect around evaluating CPD is being clear around what need you plan to address before you start any CPD processes. It may be that professional learning activities cause unintended outcomes, but there should always be a planned need that you are addressing. This could be anything from staff morale to specific pupil outcomes, and the five levels above will help you identify which outcome it falls under and consider which outcomes are priorities.
To identify needs you are likely to use a range of different strategies. Pupil outcomes, feedback from staff, appraisal meetings, pupil progress meetings, upcoming changes etc, will all inform you in identifying which need you wish to address. You will want to ensure that as many staff as possible have some opportunity to feed into this needs analysis.
Once you are clear on what the issue is, whether that’s fixing a problem or building on a success, ask yourself “what would success look like?”. This will then help to you to identify the types of measures that you will look for when evaluating the CPD during and after any planned activities.
Consider who you include in your evaluation
There is a tendency to consider the evaluation of CPD as something that is done by school leadership to justify spending. That is obviously one factor, but there are two key aims to evaluating CPD – a summative evaluation of whether it has had an impact, and a formative evaluation of how it can be refined or changed as the learning takes place. Staff need to have a major role in formative evaluation as they are the ones who spend the most time with the pupils and have the most information on what needs they have.
Changing what evaluating CPD means
Finally, we need to reconsider the purpose of evaluating CPD. Of course there are pressures on schools at a macro level to ensure that time and money are spent well. Similarly, it is important to look at needs across the school and ensure that any big trends are being addressed by the professional learning processes.
However, it is equally important to consider how staff are supported to evaluate the impact of their CPD and their practice.
The very process of evaluating the impact of a change of practice at a micro level in the classroom is not only informative, it is also excellent CPD itself and excellent practice. Teaching staff and many support staff work most closely with pupils and are in the best position to consider the impact on pupils, and this should be explored at classroom level, and then collated at a wider school level.
Evaluating the impact of CPD can be challenging and the impact can be multi-layered and complicated. Some aspects will certainly be harder to evaluate than others. However, by using the work of Guskey and breaking down the need you are addressing and the impact you wish to have along all of these levels, you can be supported to see how your CPD is changing practice and learning in your school.
- Bridget Clay is the network programme manager for the Teacher Development Trust, a national charity for professional learning. Find out more at www.tdtrust.org and for information on the TDT Network, visit http://tdtrust.org/network
Further information
- Developing Great Teachers, Teacher Development Trust, June 2015: http://TDTrust.org/dgt
- School Leadership and Student Outcomes: Identifying what works and why, Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE), 2009: http://bit.ly/1cCAGoY
- Evaluating Professional Development (Guskey TR, 2000, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press).