Planning and evaluating professional development for k12 educators

Planning and Evaluating
Professional Development for
K-12 Teachers
● A self-guided eCourse
www.apasseducation.com

Course Goals:
This course is designed to educate school district leaders,
administrators, and other interested parties on current
planning and evaluative practices in professional
development (PD) for K-12 educators. Additionally, a series
of reflection questions will help course participants build a
needs assessment to use at their schools. The course is
approximately 30 slides long and will take 60 minutes to
complete.

Best Practices in Professional
Development (PD)
❑ Personalization
❑ Gamification
❑ Micro-credentialing
❑ Individualized learning plan
❑ Real-world modeling
❑ Feedback loops
❑ Expert feedback
❑ Discipline-specific PD
Table of Contents:

Personalized PD
Personalized PD is learner-focused, allowing teachers to
consider their own classroom challenges or teaching
interests. Personalized PD is beneficial because it allows for:
➔ Specialized training
Teachers receive the same kind of individualized
training as professionals in other fields.
➔ Individualized surveys and needs assessments
Know what your teachers are interested in learning.
➔ Teacher-focused
Provide teachers resources and time to explore their
own interests.

Types of Personalized PD:
Gamification
What it is: New concepts are taught through games with
levels and goals. Games really can help our brains.
For example: This game at Bettendorf Community
School District encourages teachers to learn new skills and
competencies while focusing on district needs—and
motivates with well-deserved fun!

Micro-credentialing, or demonstrating mastery of
single competencies, is gaining popularity in
school districts in Delaware, Florida, and
Tennessee. Some districts even reward micro-
credentialing with digital badges for display on
LinkedIn or elsewhere.
Further reading:
Education Week article on Micro-credentialing
Micro-credentialing
lets teachers learn
more about subjects
they are interested in,
exploring Open
Education Resources
(OERs) to Common
Core Standards, to
teaching students with
special needs and
beyond.
Types of Personalized
PD:
Micro-Credentialing
Reflect:
Would learners in your district benefit
from PD in smaller chunks of time?
Would your learners be motivated by
receiving digital badges for mastery of
a particular competency?

Types of Personalized
PD:
Individualized Learning
Plans
Montpelier School District lets teachers create
Individual Professional Development Plans (IPDPs) that
help them meet unique personal and district-wide
development goals.
When helping teachers create
Individualized Learning Plans,
try using the SMART model:
● Specific
● Measurable
● Attainable
● Relevant
● Time-bound www.apasseducation.com

Real-World Modeling
Another best practice to use in structuring your PD is
real-world modeling, or letting teachers
demonstrate what they’ve learned in front of other
teachers or colleagues before debuting new
material in their classrooms. Opportunities for real-
world modeling may include:
➔ Interactive lectures
➔ Field or lab experiences
➔ Inquiry-oriented activities

Best Practice:
Integrate feedback
loops into PD
Teachers can feel like the only people they can
rely on for feedback regarding the
successfulness of their lesson plans or
assignments are themselves.
However, the best PD lets teachers try out their
lesson plans and receive feedback soon
afterward. In your planning, leave time for peer-
to-peer collaboration and connection.
Feedback loops
also ensure that
you’re leaving time
for real-world
modeling, another
best practice in PD.

Best Practice:
Expert Feedback
Peer feedback is a necessary part of PD, however, feedback
from experts familiar with contemporary pedagogies or
subjects is also important. If your teachers are interested in
learning a new competency or practice, bring in an expert to
conduct a workshop during your PD.
You may not be
able to find an
expert to physically
be present at your
PD activities, but
what kind of online
networking with
experts in the field
could you provide?

Best Practice:
Discipline-Specific PD
Previously we believed that PD should
be a one-size-fits-all model for all
teachers. That could not be further from
the truth.
In fact, research suggests that focusing
on discipline-specific content and
pedagogy in PD can have significant
benefits. For example, a recent study
suggests that students achieved greater
science understanding from teachers
who had completed science standards–
focused PD.

Reflection Questions
● Which best practices would be most effective at your school?
● How can you determine which best practices would most
engage your teachers ?

Types of PD:
Table of Contents:
Structured PD
● PD integrated into workday
● PD curriculum built upon over
time
Refresher/Unstructured PD
● Journaling
● Microblogging
Twitter/Educational Hashtags
● PLNs

Structured PD:
Workday-Integrated PD
According to Hanover Research, the best professional development is
not the “one‐off workshop model, but should be ongoing, in‐depth, and
school‐ based.” Some ideas for workday-integrated PD include:
● Lunchtime meetings
● Regular study groups
● Reciprocal classroom observation

Structured: Long-term Curricula
Repeated PD sessions over quarters or semesters may have a syllabus and a
reading list, just like other types of courses. You may choose to focus your PD on a
particular topic. Some suggestions:
● Content students struggle with learning in a particular discipline
● School-wide and statewide learning objectives
● Instructional goals determined by instructors
● Classroom management skills
● Technological skills

Refresher/Unstructured PD: Journaling
Journaling is a way to encourage metacognition and identify patterns. Whether it
is paper or digital, a journal lets teachers reflect on their successes and
disappointments in the classroom. Teachers can assign a code to a paper calendar
hanging on a wall in their classrooms, or jot down ideas in a journal. Or, they
could keep a running Google Sheet or Doc, or even host their own blog.
Teachers may also want to use journaling as one of the recursive practices used
in their PD programs. An informal, low-stakes hour of sharing journaled content
might be welcome. www.apasseducation.com

Refresher/Unstructured PD:
Journaling
Microblogging and Twitter
Hashtags
Twitter’s hashtags for education are a
great way to sort and group Twitter
comments. New to Twitter? It’s a
powerful way to share and reflect.
Here are some of the most popular
Twitter hashtags for educators:
#lrnchat (social media and education)
#edchat
#blendchat (blended learning)
#mlearning
#elearning
#ipadchat
#pbl/#pblchat (project-based learning)
#passiondriven
#ntchat (for new teachers)
#gbl (game-based learning)
#edtech (education technology)

Refresher/Unstructured PD: Personal Learning
Networks (PLNs)
Personal learning networks (PLNs) let teachers connect with online or in-person
communities of teachers with similar goals. PLNs can be formal or informal, online
or in person. Their unifying quality is that they bring teachers together to discuss
and consider developmental information. One PLN may meet in the teachers’ lounge
for an hour every Friday, while another might share their lesson plans in an online
group. Some innovative online PLNs, like KQED Education, create collaborative
teacher communities based on subject matter.

Reflection Questions:
● What open periods do your teachers have in which you
could offer long-term PD?
● How could you encourage teachers to use online
resources?
● How can you determine if structured or unstructured
curricula would better suit your learners?

Preparing PD Resources
Subject Matter
Experts
Open Educational
Resources (OERs)
Instructional
Designers
Table of Contents:

Open Education Resources (OERs)
OER Commons contains teacher PD resources,
including:
● Videos
● Lectures
● Training sessions www.apasseducation.com

Questions to Ask Instructional Designers
An instructional designer (ID) creates learning outcomes and builds activities that help
learners master those outcomes in engaging ways. When considering an instructional
designer to design your PD materials, ask the following questions to find one to fit into your
institutional mission.
➔ Are you familiar with the standards in which our teachers align?
➔ How might you take the diverse needs of learners into account in your
instructional design?
➔ With which learning management systems (LMS) are you familiar?
➔ Can you break down [insert concept] for me in the way you would for
teachers?

Building Relationships with
Subject Matter Experts
Are you wondering how to make connections and build relationships
with experts and practitioners in the field? Here are three tips for
successful partnerships with subject matter experts, also known as
SMEs:
1. Offer a brief time-commitment before building a long-term
relationship.
2. Gather a small group of teachers to meet with the SME in a
workshop or modeling capacity, not as a lecture.
3. Connect with SMEs from around the word.

Reflection Question:
● What resources do you have available, and
what resources do you need to create?

Evaluating PD Courses
Table of Contents:
Models for evaluation:
● Surveys
● Participant demonstration

Models of Evaluation: Surveys
Surveys can help teachers reflect on their own teaching practices, while
offering valuable information about the effectiveness of PD programs. The
survey evaluation should measure teacher practices before, during, and after
the PD program for the most effective evaluation. You should use the surveys
collected to determine if the PD enabled teachers to meet the professional
goals intended by the program.
For example, teachers in the Missouri PRISM project were surveyed to
determine if the PD met the following markers of quality PD:
● Active engagement
● Content-focused materials
● Participation of all groups
● Ability to integrate information into classroom practices

Models of Evaluation:
Participant Demonstration
Participant demonstration can help determine if a PD program met its
intended goals. Some suggestions for participant demonstration, post-PD
activities include:
• Written assessment detailing mastery learning and providing examples of
application in classrooms
• Demonstrations of teaching situations that participants can describe and
critique
• Oral or written reflections describing the new content applications
• Portfolios assembled to prove mastery in a certain competency or skill

Reflection Question:
● How will you collect feedback from your
learners during and after your PD offerings?

Take-Aways
● Be personalizable
● Include opportunities for presenting new material before debuting them
in the classroom
● Be regularly offered, instead of one-off sessions
● Integrate feedback loops with colleagues and competency-focused
experts
● Be customizable for online and in-person settings
Teacher Professional Development
should:

Next Steps
1. Confer with your teachers - what do they want in their PD?
2. Plan your PD model - what is your intended level of formality?
How long is your timeline? Who will be included in your
sessions?
3. Create your materials - what materials will you use? Who will
create them? How much time do you have to craft materials
yourself?
4. Implement the program!
5. Evaluate the program - what worked well and what didn’t?
What did teachers learn and what did they fail to learn? What
can you do differently the next time?

Looking for more?
Explore our professional development resources:
http://apasseducation.com/professional-development/

Contact Us

Planning and evaluating professional development for k12 educators

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to Planning and evaluating professional development for k12 educators

Similar to Planning and evaluating professional development for k12 educators (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Planning and evaluating professional development for k12 educators