Dani Davis

Article review 6

March 20, 2004

Citation

http://www.nsdc.org/standards/evaluation.cfm

This article on the importance of staff development evaluation was published by the National Staff Development Council (NSDC).The annotated bibliography found at the end of this article suggests that the information was taken from a number of reputable sources, although no one specific author or date was cited.

Summary

The main focus of this article deals with the fact that successful evaluation of any staff development program is much more than simply asking participants to give their initial reaction to a staff development session immediately following the presentation. Although this information is helpful when designing future sessions, it does not provide information on how or if the training was used to implement the newly learned material in the classroom. Staff development that is well received initially, but never carried over into everyday teaching practices, is of little or no value to the students who are being taught.

This article also states that the success of a school’s staff development can vary from year to year and person to person. It is for this reason, that the government is questioning how effective staff development training is in improving student learning. Therefore, since a substantial increase in student learning is often not seen as being directly related to staff development activities, policy makers also question the overall value of providing teachers with the time to participate in staff development activities. The school staff can address this issue by conducting well designed evaluations of staff development activities. This can be accomplished in the following manner:

“(1) Improving the quality of current staff development efforts, and

(2) Determining the effects of staff development in terms of its intended outcomes”

The article talks about the purpose of staff development evaluation as, a tool used to improve upon what is already being done, as well as to determine how worthwhile current professional development sessions are to staff members. Based upon answers given during the evaluation, staff development designers are able to plan future session that are of more substance. This is done by keeping what has been proven to work in the past and changing or doing away with what has not.

There are several aspects of staff development mentioned in this article, which must be changed in order to ensure that what is being done pertains to the enhancement of students’ learning processes:

“(1) Initial collection of data on participants' reactions, evaluation must focus on

(2) Teachers' acquisition of new knowledge and skills,

(3) How that learning affects teaching, and in turn

(4) How those changes in practice affect student learning. In addition, evaluators may also be asked to provide evidence of

(5) How staff development has affected school culture and other organizational structures.

It is also important to realize that different groups of people consider different factor when rating the success of any given program. School district leaders often measure success based on immediate increases in achievement and test scores. Whereas, teachers measure the success if staff development based on want to know if the staff development that they have participated in has improved their teaching practices and effectiveness. Most of all, teachers are concerned with whether or not all the many times overwhelming changes they have made in response to the staff development training are indeed improving student learning abilities.

On the other hand, school board members and state legislators’ main concern is meeting the state mandates on their testing measures. More rigorous assessments of staff development training have been designed at the state and local levels. Performance on state measures dictates how much funding is given to education in each state. Therefore, increase in student success on state measures truly is of great importance.

Implications of Staff Development by Author

The author feels that follow-up evaluations of staff development will invariably improve the effectiveness of staff development training on all students’ academic success. Also, it assists the staff in determining the changes that need to be made, in order to further increase successful classroom implementation of the effective practices learned in the staff development sessions.

My Reaction

It is very important to follow up staff development sessions with an evaluation of how effective staff development was in increasing students’ learning abilities. An evaluation of the staff development session immediately following a session should be seen only as the first step in the assessment and evaluation process. Follow up is necessary to ensure that continuous staff development improvements are always being implemented.

It is also necessary for professional development designers to acknowledge the fact that different groups define “success” of staff development sessions differently. As stated in the article, “Staff development evaluation must take into consideration each group's needs with regard to evaluation data. It must ensure the process is in place to collect the needed data and that the audience has the prerequisite knowledge and skills to interpret and use the information.” Perhaps, a solution to this problems is to have each group of people evaluate only they aspects of the program that pertain to their specific job responsibilities.