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Posted by:
Sally Harrison
K-12 Classroom teacher
Lynnwood, WA
Topic:
Provide Support for Implementation
Message:
One of the major obstacles, I believe, is the belief system that expects a direct, causal relationship between the delivery of professional development and measures of student achievement. Discussions among those involved in assessing teachers' needs, planning of professional development, and assessing student performance can reveal the more complex relationships among variables and still allow the correlations to be revealed in order to improve both the professional development opportunities and student learning results. Group processes that assist groups in the analysis of student data and the causal factors related to those data can be used to develop a clear picture of how a particular professional development initiative is related to student achievement.
One example of this comes from one of our four quadrants. Each quadrant represents a geographically-connected group of schools that feed into one of our four comprehensive high schools. A facilitator who has background in group processes that can help a diverse group move from data to action planning led an analysis of freshmen course-failure rates, beginning first with building administrators and then involving teacher-administrator teams from all of the schools in the quadrant. The assessment office provided data in response to the questions asked by the group. Then the group again analyzed the data, revealing both more questions and some possible causal factors. After several iterations of more data, more questions, and grouping of causal factors, an action plan emerged. The plan would provide focused professional development, as the most powerful action to improve freshmen success rates. The process thus linked increased student achievement to professional development, but acknowledged various causal factors which will also need to be addressed over time.
One thing I would like to share with others is the importance of expecting professional development participants to actually implement the practice or learning in the classroom, expecting reflection about the impact on students, and expecting to provide time to again come together to share and support what folks tried, both successes and challenges. We have now developed this set of expectations into one of our professional development guiding principles, because we had not been clear enough about that in the past. We found that often folks either didn't even try to use new skills or knowledge or tried, but had difficulty and found support unavailable. If you don't intentionally expect adults to link what adults learn to what students do and provide support for continued practice of new skills and knowledge, you can't expect professional development to have any impact on student learning.
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