Thomas Guskey on Planning Professional Development Backwards

(Originally titled “Planning Professional Learning”)

In this article in Educational Leadership, Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky/ Lexington) casts a skeptical eye on professional development in many schools. Too often, he says, we “fall prey to clever consultants and adept entrepreneurs more concerned with what sells than with what works to improve student learning. Seduced by dynamic presentations and jazzy technology, desperate school leaders jump onto education bandwagons, committing scarce resources to strategies and programs based more on wishes and promises than on solid evidence of effectiveness.” 

In the past, Guskey has suggested that professional development activities should be evaluated by looking at evidence in these key areas:

• How did participants react?
• Did participants acquire new knowledge and skills?
• Did the school or district support the initiative?
• Did participants put their new knowledge and skills to work in classrooms?
• Did student learning improve?

“Because each level builds on those that came before,” he says, “success at one level is necessary for success at each higher level, and no level should be neglected in the evaluation process.” 

But when it comes to planning professional development, Guskey believes the sequence should be reversed, planning backwards from desired student learning outcomes. Here are his main points in each area:

• Desired student learning outcomes and how they will be measured – Trouble spots and areas for improvement can be spotted in standardized test scores, subgroup data, interim assessments, classroom assessments, discipline data, classroom observations, focus groups, and interviews. Guskey notes that teachers tend to prefer evidence from classroom assessments and insights from homework completion and behavior reports. Administrators tend to prefer standardized test scores and district assessments. The compromise: multiple measures!

• New practices to be implemented – The key question is: What instructional approaches will produce the desired student learning? What is the evidence for various possible approaches? “We need to be willing to challenge consultants who preface their statements with the phrase, ‘Research says…” by asking, ‘What research?’,” says Guskey. “And we should expect detailed answers with specific citations that we can verify.” Be skeptical of references to blogs, newspaper articles, Google searches, or Twitter and Facebook, he advises. “Look specifically for publications that are refereed, meaning that experts in the field have reviewed the articles and judged them as sufficiently rigorous to yield trustworthy results.” 

• Organizational support – “Many valuable improvement efforts fail miserably because of a lack of active participation and clear support from school leaders,” says Guskey. “Others prove ineffective because schools have not provided the resources required for implementation.” Teachers need time, funding, materials, and technology to make new programs work. They also need ongoing feedback on how things are going, which means frequent observations of classrooms, interim assessments, and rapid feedback.

• Educator knowledge and skills – What will teachers need to know and be able to do to reach the student-learning goals? This will drive the what and why of professional development, says Guskey: “Participants must develop sufficient depth in their knowledge of new practices so that they can adjust these practices to fit the nuances of their particular context while maintaining program fidelity. At the same time, they must understand the rationale behind the change.” 

• Optimal professional learning activities – After attending to the first four steps, it’s time to design PD. Will the most effective strategy be a seminar or workshop? Action-research projects? Organized study groups? PLC work? There’s a wide range of choices, and what’s effective in one context may not be in another. “What works always depends on where, when, and with whom,” says Guskey. “But if we begin with the end in mind and plan backward, we can take many of those context-specific elements into consideration, making success much more likely.”

“Planning Professional Learning” by Thomas Guskey in Educational Leadership, 

May 2014 (Vol. 71, #8, p. 10-16), http://bit.ly/1j7ypaW; Guskey can be reached at Guskey@uky.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #536