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Make evaluation count

To Assess Impact, Know What To Measure

By Amy Pendray and Jennifer Crockett
Categories: Evaluation & impact
December 2016
In complex educational systems, stakeholders with varied interests often put the greatest value on singular, summative outcomes tied to high-stakes tests. While those summative outcomes are useful and important, an investment in teacher learning intended to improve student achievement is also a treasure worth pursuing. So how do we, at a systems level, know that our investment in teacher learning is making a difference? How do we ensure that professional learning is impacting teacher practice in a way that leads to improved student outcomes? As professional development providers for myPD (an online, personalized professional growth system) in Long Beach Unified, a large urban school district in California, we feel a responsibility to wrestle with these questions. We want to deliver high-quality professional learning that ultimately

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Authors

Amy Pendray and Jennifer Crockett

Amy Pendray (apendray@lbschools.net) and Jennifer Crockett (jcrockett@lbschools.net) are program specialists at myPD.

Guskey’s Critical Levels of Evaluation

Level 1: Participants’ reactions.

Level 2: Participants’ learning.

Level 3: Organization support and change.

Level 4: Use of new knowledge and skills.

Level 5: Student learning outcomes.

Source: Guskey, 2002.

References

Guskey, T.R. (2000). Evaluating professional development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Guskey, T.R. (2002). Does it make a difference? Evaluating professional development. Educational Leadership, 59(6), 45-51.


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