Too often, professional learning planning relies on intuition, assumptions, and misaligned goals. NTC’s Designing for Impact identifies commonly ignored questions and challenges to design professional learning for a sound and sensible investment.

This webinar provided an introduction to a tool and team-based process that answers the question: How can we design, implement, and evaluate PL guided by data and evidence, leaning into what we know and accounting for what we don’t?

Speakers:

• Dr. Lisa Schmitt, NTC Senior Director, Impact
• Dr. Marva Pittman, NTC Director, Impact Consultation
• Allison Brown, NTC Program Consultant
• Ashley Colburn, Director of Teacher Induction and Coaching Resources, Bright Star Schools

Our thanks to Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies for ongoing support and webinar sponsorship.

Highlights and takeaways:

A tool to avoid common pitfalls in PL design
A tool, a protocol, a process, Designing for Learning [link to DfI webpage] supports the planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of any PL initiative or program, large or small.

• The protocol brings the right teams together to consider what are often the missing pieces of PL design. These include:
  • Missing important people and perspectives in shaping or informing the design – not all the right people are at the table in the beginning
  • Planning based on limited definitions of student success (e.g., standardized tests) that won’t tell the full story.
  • Misaligned PL that isn’t focused on the district’s priority student outcomes or that are too general to target (say, overall math proficiency vs. mathematical problem solving or student engagement in learning), and PL that doesn’t address the specific and aligned teaching skill or knowledge to achieve those outcomes.
  • Not considering the organizational supports that provide enabling conditions for professional learning success.
  • Emphasizing positive reactions to the learning experience over actual measures of effectiveness.

Designing for five levels of success
Based on the work of Dr. Thomas Guskey, the tool guides teams to start with the end goal in mind — the specific student experience and student learning you want to see — and work backwards, asking and answering the right questions to clarify five levels of measurement. Success at one level impacts the success of the subsequent level.

5. Student learning: How does the PL support improved student experiences and learning?
4. Transfer to practice: To what extent do participants use the new knowledge and skills they’ve learned?
3. Organizational supports for change: How do systems support, or change to support, sustained improvement in practice and student outcomes?
2. Participant learning: To what extent do participants learn new knowledge and skills?
1. Perceived value of PL experience: To what extent do participants value the experience?

Design steps — Articulate, Identify, Define
The tool walks you through a series of steps and and aligned set of questions that support teams to:

• Identify critical stakeholders with specific attention to those non-traditional participants who might just provide the missing perspective needed for maximum impact
• Articulate project objectives by identifying what changes you want to see in student learning and what corresponding research-based changes in teacher practice are required
• Identify types of evidence aligned with those objectives that truly measure the changes you want to see
• Identify sources of that evidence and specify data collection objectives, leveraging existing data sources such as learning walks, surveys,
• Define measurable goals, specifying clear targets and benchmarks for ongoing monitoring
• Schedule regular data discussions to review progress and course correct as necessary.

And it works!
Our partner from BrightStar Schools shared how Designing for Impact has shaped mentor PL and induction programming.

• “The tool helped us focus on the student experience and backwards plan from it and create a theory of action that involves (and engaged) all stakeholders.”
• “It lets us be big-picture and detail-oriented simultaneously. We are focusing on what matters most — with a clearer path on how to get there.”
• “It helped us think in terms of what’s going to happen in a couple weeks or in a couple months as a result of the training — what will mentors be doing, what will teachers be doing, so if we aren’t seeing it, we know we need to dig into that before we get to the end of the year.
• “It also helped us pay attention to level 3 — which I think can be often overlooked — what are the necessary conditions for this learning to be implemented? In the past, I was inclined to jump from “did they learn it” to “are they implementing it” without taking a step back to ensure that the correct conditions are in place.”
• “It’s easy to set aspirational goals and find traditional survey metrics, but this approach pushes us to show impact on all those levels and track it along the way.”