PD CoP Week: Marguerite Dimgba and Sheila Robinson Kohn on Evaluating Professional Development: Guskey Level 4 – Participant’s Use Of New Knowledge And Skills

Hi! We are Marguerite Dimgba and Sheila Robinson Kohn, Professional Learning Center Director and Policy Board Chair, from Greece Central School District in Rochester, NY.

While Guskey indicates that this level of evaluation cannot be completed at the end of a professional development (PD) session or even multi-session course, we do begin to gather data from participants at this time, mostly as this is when we have easy access to them.  We use an online PD tool with a required anonymous feedback form participants complete after they have finished their courses.

Lesson Learned:

• Utilize Participant Feedback. We collaboratively analyze data with policy board members (teachers, administrators, a university professor, parent, student, and private school teacher), understanding that the intended users of these data are individual instructors and the district as a whole. We then modify feedback forms (i.e. questions, response options) in hopes of collecting even better data to help us continue to make high quality programmatic decisions regarding PD for our district.

Hot Tips:

• Discover Participants’ Learning Use. In addition to questions on participant satisfaction and learning, one question we ask for Level 4 is, “Will you be able to USE what you’ve learned?” As you can see from the graph below, 97% of our PD participants over the last year indicated that that have already applied the content, the content was relevant, or they feel they will be able to apply some of the content to their practice.

It is important to note here, that our online PD tool is not just for teachers. These respondents include any district employee who engages in any type of PD.

•  Discover Participants’ Learning Needs. Our next question asks, “What do you NEED to further APPLY what you have learned today?” As you can see from the graph below, about one-quarter of our participants indicate they do not need further learning to apply the content, but about 70% feel they do need additional learning opportunities.

•  Discover Participants’ Learning Application. We then ask, “MOVING FORWARD: HOW will you APPLY new learning in your practice?” The graph below indicates our participants’ varied answers to this.

•  Discover Participants’ Learning Impact. Finally, we ask participants to indicate how they will measure the impact of what they have learned in the PD experience. Data sets like these serve as important formative evaluation measures for our continued district-wide PD programming.

Rad Resource:

•  We use MyLearningPlan, a professional development management and evaluation system (PDMES), that features “planning, tracking, and evaluation of all forms of professional learning in one comprehensive online system.”  MLP features customizable evaluation forms and user-friendly output (such as these graphs) to help us analyze the effectiveness of our professional learning opportunities.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Professional Development Community of Practice (PD CoP) Week. The contributions all week come from PD CoP members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluator.