When considering evaluation of CPD, it is useful to use Guskey’s five levels:
- Participant Reaction
- Participant Learning
- Organisation and Support
- Participant Practice
- Student learning outcomes
All of these are important, as each level builds on the one before. If teachers find a session hard to hear, they probably won’t have learnt anything new, so are unlikely to change their practice and impact on student learning outcomes. It can be helpful to consider all of these levels.
This article from SecEd, Five principles to help you evaluate your CPD, explores this further.
You might also want to consider who is involved in evaluation. Effective evaluation of CPD includes ‘macro’ evaluation across the school (e.g. looking at overall learning outcomes) but, at least as importantly, micro evaluation in the classroom where teachers are involved in evaluating their own practice. Lesson Study and enquiry are good ways of enabling this.
Here we share different examples from schools to show how they have measured and evaluated a variety of processes including participant reaction, participant learning, organisational support and challenge and more. These resources were shared and discussed at our recent TDT Network Conference on Evaluation. None of the examples are completely perfect, however neither are they totally ineffectual. Depending on what you are trying to measure, they can all be useful if contextualised. We encourage you to make comments on the documents, and would welcome any feedback.
- Participant Reaction – Example 1
- Participant Reaction – Example 2
- Participant Learning – Example 1
- Participant Learning – Example 2
- Student Learning Outcome – Example 1
- Student Learning Outcome – Example 2
- Organisational Support and Challenge – Examples
- Participants’ Use of New Knowledge/Skill
This article, which first appeared in SecEd, How to effectively evaluate your CPD also explores this. It includes a worked example of how this might work.
