Think back over the past three-four months. What professional learning have you and your colleagues engaged in? For example, have you engaged in any:
peer observations,
PLCs,
workshops,
courses,
mentoring,
coaching, or
action research (just to name a few).
Was it a one-off experience, or part of a sequence of learning focused on clear goals, measures of success, multiple opportunities to learn, and embedded in practice with cycles of reflection and feedback?
Whatever professional learning you have engaged in, what evidence would tell you that it is truly making an impact on your effectiveness as an educator and ultimately on your students' learning? In essence, is your professional learning 'working'?
Schools and systems can invest a lot of time, effort and resources for professional learning, but what often seems to be missing when we talk with colleagues and educator friends is evidence of whether it really made a difference to their learning and their students’ learning.
That’s where we come in.
A vital component of our partnerships with schools and networks of schools is providing not only a clear sequence of educator learning but also an aligned and manageable evaluation process which measures both progress and impact of professional learning over time. The evidence from the evaluation process ensures that we target content and implementation to better support schools achieving their goals for student learning.
We utilise a variety of evaluation methods and tools, all developed and curated from the latest research on best practice. These are deliberately designed to support:
decision making aligned with school goals for learning,
determining the professional learning merit, worth, value and impact (i.e. Is it achieving the intended outcomes?),
gathering and using multiple sources of evidence to make informed decisions at the whole school, year/faculty, class and individual level,
monitoring ongoing progress by using the evaluation tools multiple times,
systematically including leader, teacher and student voice, and
demonstrating the overall impact of professional learning.
Ultimately, the gold in these evaluation methods and tools is that they are easy to use without compromising good evaluation practices AND they all help you answer the question: Is your professional learning 'working'?
Take a look at some of the evaluation methods and tools we are currently using with our partner schools (Figure 1).
Figure 1
Clarity Maps call out quality practice. CT-ed Clarity Maps:
are continuums which call out what leaders, teachers and students will be saying, doing and thinking as they move towards high quality and impactful practice,
are drawn from current research and the knowledge of expert practitioners, and
can be used by individuals to self-assess and/or can be used as part of an educator and learner survey.
Surveys help understand the views or experiences of educators and students. The questionnaires have been purposefully designed to:
provide longitudinal, aggregated data including baseline and key time points throughout the learning,
support educators to access a student’s perspective of the impact of their ‘work’ on student learning, and
align with other evaluation tools and methods.
Impact Evaluation Process: We also have an Impact Evaluation Process which is:
a snapshot over time,
informed by multiple sources of evidence including:
student voice,
teacher voice,
school leader voice, and
school artefacts such as strategic plans, work programs, student samples of work, policies etc...
The Impact Evaluation Process includes a school visit, a progress report and consultation process to discuss findings and determine next steps. This process ideally occurs annually or bi-annually to capture progress over time.
We can support you in engaging in professional learning and provide the methods and tools to evaluate regularly. We can help you to determine if professional learning is 'working'.
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