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Professional Development That Makes a Difference

Part II  – The 12 Building Blocks of Successful Transfer

It is remarkably easy to waste time and money on professional development that produces no real change. The opportunities to attend interesting and exciting events are everywhere.  The edu-tainment industry is big business and can send everyone home well-fed, significantly dazzled and at least temporarily motivated.  Yet the data on transfer of new knowledge from training to the learning environment remains poor and, as resources diminish, cost-effectiveness becomes increasingly more critical.

Yes, it is more effort and more expensive to set up a system that can help ensure consistent transfer of  knowledge and skills from professional development, but it is a whole lot more expensive not to.  Plus, once  in place and a model established, the future costs go down and benefits multiply into other areas and future changes.

In Part I of this series we reviewed research of Joyce and Showers that identifies the four components of effective professional development: knowledge and theory, models and demonstration, sufficient practice and peer coaching or collaborative implementation. In order for training to be delivered that includes these four components over an extended period of time certain structures and resources need to be present in the workplace. They also create a context for the training effort that helps ensure that positive change occurs.  In their research Joyce and Showers found that:

  1. Strong school leadership is essential to professional development transfer.  Leadership needs to work toward creating a culture for change that starts with a clear vision.
  2. Effective leadership teams can add power to make and sustain changes.
  3. The goal of the effort needs to be significant. If the end goal is not clear and substantial not much will likely change. Just doing what has always been done a little better is not going to produce major change or motivate people to work harder.
  4. Professional development is most effective in the context of a coordinated, coherent and focused effort. Much like the mantra of real estate is “location, location, location, the mantra here is: “focus, focus, focus”. Attempting too many things virtually guarantees that little will change.
  5. A comprehensive plan should be in place. Individual training events may provide direction, motivation and basic knowledge but without a plan that puts those events in the context of a greater effort, little progress should be expected.
  6. The plan needs to include specifics regarding follow-up and implementation such as identifying what the expectations are, what supports will be provided, what data is to be collected, etc.
  7. The effort needs to be supported by organizational changes that demonstrate its importance, pave the way for implementation and address any challenges that arise. This could include revising schedules, creating teams, dedicating faculty meeting and inservice time, etc.
  8. Make clear what will be different when the desired outcomes is achieved and what the evidence of this change will be. This data can be collected early on and used as formative assessment.
  9. The effort should support the participants to become better learners. Learning how to be better learners can be just as important as the acquisition of new knowledge and skills. Self-assessment, reflection and other meta-cognitive strategies can be used to great effect.
  10. Resources needed to sustain the change should be identified and committed. Change doesn’t happen overnight but many educators have learned from experience that most initiatives don’t last very long. Evidence of long-term commitments not only shows the importance of the effort but helps ensure full implementation.
  11.  The design of individual events and the supports that follow them need to be tailored to the complexity of the content and the degree of the expected change. Not every event and effort has the same goals and should look the same.
  12.  Perhaps most importantly for transfer according to Joyce and Shower’s research is a Collaborative Implementation/ Peer Coaching system that should be set up before the change effort begins. This will give staff the opportunity to practice working together in a collaborative manner if they haven’t been doing so already.

 

The lesson here is that positive change as a result of professional development rarely happens on its own and that we know what makes a difference. The challenge is using this knowledge to make professional development consistently pay off.

What  Joyce and Showers mean by Collaborative Implementation or Peer Coaching  will be the topic of Part III.

 

 

Dennis has been the Director of the the VT-HEC since it was founded in 2000. He spent 16 years at the VT-DOE as Director of teams with various names that included: special education, Title I, health and wellness and other family and education support services. Prior to that Dennis worked at the Barre Town School (VT) starting as a special educator and serving many years as the Director of Student Support Services. He also spent 6 years as a classroom teacher grades 5-8 in NJ.

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