Navigating Professional Development Evaluation
 It
makes no sense to face backward if you want to see where you are headed.
Tom Guskey—a professor and the author of Evaluating Professional
Development (2000)—makes this point in person when he speaks,
as he often does at conferences, about professional development. An
equally important aspect of travel (and professional development) is
making sure that the place where you arrive is actually your planned
destination.
Professional development’s destination is the improvement of students’
achievement. In claiming students’ increased achievement as a
result of professional development, evaluation is crucial. This is as
true for a teacher applying a method of approaching word problems in
a mathematics class as it is for an entire district implementing a writing
program. But what is the best way to design and conduct such evaluation?
Educational psychology courses taught some of us to think differently
about the word learning. Learning could be said to have occurred,
we were told, if there was a permanent change in behavior. Some learning
took only a short time—you touched that hot stove only once —and
your behavior changed forever. Other learning (such as reading) took
many lessons over time. To measure the changes involved in such complex
behavior was a multifaceted project. Understanding the thinking underlying
such measurement seemed a daunting odyssey to many of us.
 Today,
evaluating professional development’s effects need not be an odyssey—if
you have the right charts. Happily for us, Guskey’s book has been
crafted most helpfully and can steer us through evaluation’s complex
waters. He organizes evaluation in five levels. The first four assess
the participants in professional development. Assessing student outcomes
is the fifth level. Guskey points out that while assessing student outcomes
is a relatively recent development (starting in the 1980s), it is increasingly
a major focus, as in a 1994 General Accounting Office report that “chastised
the Department [of Education] for the lack of data linking teacher professional
development programs to student achievement” (Guskey, p. 207).
To help us organize our thinking, Guskey matches types of student learning
that we might assess—cognitive (knowledge and understanding),
affective (attitudes) and psychomotor (skills, behaviors and practices)—
and sample assessment instruments. As do all good teachers and guides,
Guskey first creates a clear picture of the behaviors and assessment
models and only then takes us by the Scylla and Charybdis of
such issues as validity and reliability. By this time, we are ready
for them.
Guskey is clear without oversimplifying. A good example is his well-paced
discussion on his model relating student achievement to professional
development. It maps for us the paths of professional development (its
content, process and context) and the teachers’ (and school’s
and parents’) effects on students’ learning (pp. 73, 77).
As evaluation is such a crucial process, it is best,
says Guskey, if schools and districts create and conduct their own,
but what if, for whatever reason, the school or district cannot? Here
too Guskey guides us through a thoughtful discussion (pp. 255-257).
Internalizing Guskey’s book will improve the thinking of anyone
involved in evaluation, and as teachers we all are. This book is an
essential one for improving our own professional development and our
students’ learning outcomes.
Guskey, T. (2000). Evaluating Professional Development.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
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