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Dyslexia Awareness: Preparing New Educators

When I began working with individuals with dyslexia in 1988, I was so green. I only had three years of teaching experience under my belt, and my college classes had not prepared me to find solutions for struggling readers.

So, I took it upon myself to learn as much about dyslexia as possible. I became a Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT). I obsessed over the intervention process, trying method after method to perfect my skills in the classroom.

Now, as Assessment Specialist for my district, I have the opportunity to better equip new dyslexia and classroom educators to work with struggling readers. Based on my experience as a teacher and administrator, here are the seven biggest challenges, along with strategies for overcoming them.

1. Recognize the Characteristics of Dyslexia

Do you work with students with dyslexia? If you are a teacher, you almost certainly do. According to the International Dyslexia Association, as many as fifteen to twenty percent of school-age children have dyslexia. [1] So, your classroom of twenty-five students may have three or more students with dyslexia.

It is characterized by deficits in decoding, sight word reading, reading fluency and spelling. These reading difficulties must be the result of problems with phonological awareness because dyslexia is caused by the way the brain processes sounds in spoken language.

Dyslexia can be identified in students as early as kindergarten and early identification leads to students who are more successful throughout school. [2]

As many as 15 – 20% of school-age children have #dyslexia. Are you helping them learn to self-advocate?

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2. Keep it Legal: State & Federal Dyslexia Law

In the U.S., we have laws that ensure students with disabilities are protected and that their individual needs are met. In some states, students with dyslexia are under the umbrella of IDEA and are served through special education. In other states, students with dyslexia are protected through general education under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Staying up to date on the many regulations designed to help educators working with children with special needs can be intense. However, there are free resources to keep you informed of your state’s regulations. And don’t be afraid to reach out to fellow educators with questions.

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Webinar: Learn Core Concepts of Section 504.

3. Individualize Support

Students with dyslexia struggle to learn to read and their educators often struggle as well. In some cases, student success only occurs when teachers are innovative, flexible and supportive. There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach when it comes to teaching individuals ― even seasoned educators need help sorting through the available options.

To avoid frustration or research fatigue, find a few reliable sources you can turn to. Campus IEP and 504 committee members are excellent sources for ideas, programs and tips about what is and isn’t working for individual students.

4. Gather the Right Data

Monitoring students at every stage will help you identify those who are struggling, gauge their progress, plan lessons that are appropriate and provide feedback to parents and learners.

Administrators can help with gathering and analyzing classroom data by:

  • Presenting teachers with clear expectations
  • Identifying district and campus norms that teachers can use to pinpoint areas of struggle
  • Providing a system for sharing data with other decision makers

Classroom teachers must have enough knowledge about dyslexia to use the available data to know which students may need additional help.

5. Encourage Self-Advocation

How do you help students learn to help themselves? This is a years-long process that begins with modeling positive attitudes about dyslexia in front of students and parents.

I provide students with information and practice, so they feel comfortable responding if teased about being dyslexic. The goal is for the student to handle difficult situations without assistance.

Teach students all about dyslexia. Talk about the characteristics, share the research about interventions, post photos of famous dyslexics in your classroom and role-play situations where students can teach others about the disability. Turn a difference into an asset.

When teachers advocate for students, individuals with dyslexia are gathering tools to learn to self-advocate. #DyslexiaAwarenessMonth

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6. Challenge Misconceptions

Educators share humorous stories with me of things that students, parents and teachers believe about dyslexia. These are often based on ideas that were disproven years ago but will not die. Here are some common misconceptions:

  • Dyslexic individuals see backwards (dyslexia is a phonological disorder)
  • Students outgrow dyslexia (it is lifelong)
  • Dyslexia is characterized by letter reversals (it is usually a visual-motor or developmental difficulty)

One parent even reported to me that her child “caught” dyslexia. As an educator, arm yourself with up-to-date, correct information and current research about this disability to share in situations like these.

7. Plan Data-based Accommodations & Progress Monitoring

Most students with dyslexia have protections under either IDEA or Section 504. This likely includes an accommodation plan to ensure the student has equal access to the school-wide curriculum. The only appropriate accommodation for a student with dyslexia is the one that meets his or her individual needs. As a result, the classroom teacher is best equipped to gather data about what the individual student needs and to systematically try interventions to see which are successful.

So, keep meticulous records to help the IEP or 504 committee find effective strategies. Once the plan is in place, consistent recordkeeping and data sharing with other teachers and committee members will gauge the success or failure of a student’s plan.

In Summary: Success Takes Perseverance

Individuals with dyslexia can have very positive experiences in school, especially with the appropriate interventions. They have learned perseverance from watching those who have tirelessly worked with and for them. Most pass state assessments, take the SAT or ACT and go on to have successful careers. Their teachers modeled steadfastness and work ethic, and the importance of an end goal. Working through the struggles that occur in school, along with access to caring advocates and a steady support system, can transform a learner with no confidence into a school and community leader.

I am not going to say teaching kids with dyslexia is an easy job. Teaching students with dyslexia is hard and requires long hours, extra steps and more data collection than seems possible. Despite these challenges, I still love my job. I live for the texts I get from students about the novels they’re reading in class. I dance on air after a 504 or IEP meeting where a student has completed the dyslexia program and is on grade level, ready to soar. I sign college and job reference letters for former students with jubilation.

When teachers advocate for students, dyslexic individuals are gathering tools to learn to self-advocate. They can speak up and educate others about dyslexia. Watching students grow and bloom and overcome disability is worth all of the challenges involved.

Whether using a 504 Plan or an IEP to support a student with dyslexia, Frontline makes it easier to plan data-driven accommodations and measure their efficacy. Learn how.

[1] International Dyslexia Association. (2017). Retrieved from https://dyslexiaida.org/dyslexia-basics.

[2] Texas Education Agency. (2014). Procedures Concerning Dyslexia and Related Disorders. Retrieved from https://www.region10.org/r10website/assets/File/DHBwithtabs10214.pdf.

Effective Strategies for Analyzing Professional Development Data: It’s Not As Hard As You Think!

I remember struggling through my college statistics class. Just the term “data analysis” made me cringe. After all, I was going to be a teacher, not a scientist! Now that I’ve spent years collecting and analyzing data I’ve learned, I don’t need to be a statistician to do professional development program evaluation.

Whether you love or hate the idea of analyzing data, you probably don’t have loads of time on your hands — but you still need answers. You need actionable knowledge in order to report out results that inform smart decisions about professional learning. Good news! In this article, I’ll share strategies for analyzing and interpreting data in a painless way that doesn’t require unlimited time or advanced skills.

What is Data Analysis?

Data analysis and interpretation is about taking raw data and turning it into something meaningful and useful, much in the same way you turn sugar, flour, eggs, oil and chocolate into a cake! Analyzing data in service to answering your evaluation questions will give you the actionable insights you need. It’s important to remember that these questions drive data collection in the first place.

Since you’re generally not running experiments with randomly sampled study participants and control groups, you don’t need advanced statistical calculations or models to learn from professional development data. You mainly need to analyze basic survey data, and to do that, you will look at descriptive statistics.

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Summarizing the Data

Raw data rarely yields insights. It’s simply too overwhelming to scan rows and rows of numbers or lines and lines of text and make meaning of it without reducing it somehow. People analyze data in order to detect patterns and glean key insights from it.

First, it’s helpful to understand the proportion of professional learning participants who complete a survey. This is your survey response rate. Your response rate is simply the number of people who completed the survey divided by the total number eligible to take the survey.

Example:

Effective Strategies

Next, use descriptive statistics including percentages, frequencies and measures of central tendency to summarize the data. Measures of central tendency — the mean, median, mode, and range — are summary statistics that describe the center of a given set of values.

Definitions and statistics

Choosing the Right Statistic to Report

How do you know when to use mean vs. median? When you know you have outliers, use the median. Here’s an example of how these measures can differ greatly in the same dataset. Let’s say you want to describe a group of 16 professional learning participants in terms of how much teaching experience they have. Here are the values and measures of central tendency:

Choosing the right statistic

Which summary statistic best describes this population of participants? The mean can be very sensitive to outliers, while the median is not. The mean of this dataset is 9 years, but the median is only 3. This means that half of participants have 3 or fewer years’ experience. In this case, knowing that half of participants were novice teachers may give you greater insight and better inform future programmatic decisions than knowing the average number of years of teaching experience of the group.

Example Insight: Half of the participants in this professional learning activity were novice teachers, which can be used to inform future decisions about professional development.

Next, you may want to cross-tabulate results. Cross-tabulating means looking at your dataset by subgroup to compare how different groups answered the questions. For example:

  • Were high school teachers more satisfied than elementary teachers?
  • Did more veteran teachers report great learning gains than novice teachers?
  • Did more teachers from one school express an intent to try a new instructional strategy?

Most online survey programs make cross-tabulation easy with built-in features, but you can also use pivot tables if your dataset is in a spreadsheet.

Descriptive Statistics Have Limits

Caution: when participants haven’t been randomly assigned and required to respond to feedback surveys, these types of analyses cannot be used to generalize to all teachers who participated in the professional learning. It’s always a possibility that more satisfied participants completed the survey and that more dissatisfied participants did not.

Descriptive statistics are helpful for telling what happened, but they can’t determine causality. They can’t tell you why something happened. You may know that 87% of participants feel they learned a great deal from participating in professional learning, but you won’t know what caused them to learn. That’s where qualitative data can help fill in the blanks.

Qualitative Data Analysis

Surveys may include some open-ended questions, or you may have conducted individual interviews or focus groups as part of professional development program evaluation. Crafting these questions carefully can help you understand why people experienced professional learning the way they did.

But what do you do with all of these answers, the words people write or say in response to these open-ended questions? Rigorous qualitative data analysis involves significant study to develop the needed skills, but you can still take a few easy steps to make sense of qualitative data in a credible way that will give you insight into participants’ experiences in professional learning.

Step 1: Begin by becoming very familiar with the data – just reading and rereading survey responses, interview transcripts or focus group notes. Try not to get caught up in the very positive or the very negative attention-grabbing comments at this stage.

Step 2: Revisit your evaluation questions to refresh what you need to know for the program evaluation.

Step 3: Start looking for patterns as you read and reread. Assign “codes” to chunks of text. If a participant talks about wishing there was more time to learn and practice what was learned, the code might be “time.” If another comment has to do with concern about administrative support, the code might be “support.” As you progress through the data, attempt to reduce as much as you can to codes that you generate from your reading. Write each code next to the data as you go along.

Step 4: Once you’ve coded all data, look for patterns in the codes. Are there sets of codes that are related and could become categories?

Interpreting the Data

Interpreting data is attaching meaning to it. For example, let’s say that 37% of professional learning participants indicated they learned something new. At first glance, that doesn’t sound like a particularly good outcome, does it? Too often, people view raw data like this in either a positive or negative light without taking the time to fully understand what’s really going on. What if I told you this was a refresher course for people who had already learned the material? In that case you might then interpret it as a positive outcome that more than one third picked up new learning.

Too often in professional development program evaluation, people assign meaning to raw data without taking the time to fully understand what’s going on. -@SheilaBRobinson

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Numbers don’t have inherent meaning. It’s up to us to put them in context to make sense of them.

What About Statistical Significance?

People like to ask about this, and most likely, what they’re really asking is, “Are the results you’re reporting on important? Are the differences we are seeing meaningful to us in any way?” Statistical significance is a technical term that has to do with whether results of an experiment are true, or are more likely due to chance. In evaluating professional learning programs, you are not likely to use the statistical analyses that result in statistical significance.

What If I Have a Small Sample?

You may be wondering, “I only surveyed 20 people — is that really enough data to give me an accurate picture of what’s really going on?” Absolutely! Remember, it’s about answering your evaluation questions to inform future professional learning programs. Even with what might seem like low response rates, you can still gain valuable insights, and make smart decisions for your school or district.

Next in the series, we’ll turn analyses and interpretation into a usable report!

No Substitute for Customer Service

As a former substitute classroom aide, Barbara Valencia is uniquely positioned to explain what exactly makes being a sub so difficult. How hard it can be to walk into an unfamiliar classroom full of unfamiliar students and try to teach an unfamiliar lesson plan. How daunting it can feel to have to treat every day as if it were your very first on the job; often, because that’s precisely what it is.

Barbara recently appeared on Frontline Education’s K-12 conversations podcast, Field Trip, where she shared some of the often-uncomfortable thoughts that run through the minds of classroom-wary substitutes:

“It was like being on a job interview every single day,” Barbara said. “Everything was new. I didn’t know where to go, who to talk to, where to get lunch, where my classroom was.”

Barbara Valencia

Now working in Human Resources at Spring Grove Area School District, Barbara has discovered a creative way to marry her experience as a substitute aide — coupled with her experience working the phones at a local electric company — with the needs of the district.

With the team at Spring Grove, she is focusing on something that’s key to substitute engagement, but rarely brought up in discussions regarding K-12: customer service for substitute teachers.

By focusing on the thoughts, feelings and overall fit of Spring Grove’s subs, Barbara has implemented a substitute management system that places the emphasis on the “customer” — the substitutes. They’re making a concerted effort to keep subs engaged as they support students — and that, Barbara says, is what keeps substitutes coming back to Spring Grove.

“When you have good customer service, people tend to return. It’s no different with subs.”

Barbara Valencia

Putting People First

The truth is that substitutes  have a choice. If one district doesn’t communicate well, or if another refuses to rid themselves of archaic substitute management processes, substitute teachers can simply choose to work elsewhere.

That’s why Spring Grove has focused on customer service — putting people first — to ensure that substitutes choose to work in their classrooms.

Administrators at Spring Grove know that phenomenal customer service isn’t based on a single interaction. They start by ensuring that substitutes feel welcomed from the moment they enter a school, meeting them when they arrive in the morning.

Leaders then take it a step further — like the time Barbara baked a plate full of cookies as a thank you to a sub after putting them in a less-than-ideal situation. From cc’ing subs on emails regarding important administrative changes, to sending cards on their birthdays, it’s all about substitute engagement and communication.

“It’s more of a team effort and they’re not just a sub or just a number or just a breathing person to walk into the room. They actually are part of our team.”

Barbara Valencia

“It’s more of a team effort and they’re not just a sub or just a number or just a breathing person to walk into the room. They actually are part of our team.”

But that’s not the only change Spring Grove has made.

The district holds an open house every summer, aimed at updating interested substitutes on any new processes. They provide training for all online software systems the substitutes may have to use, and they even distribute a booklet on the district, including information on other teachers and student highlights. And when a new substitute does start in the district, they make sure to provide context for everything, ensuring that person is in-the-loop.

“Once you’re a Spring Grove employee, you’re getting retirement benefits, you’re getting all the same benefits our part-time employees do, so it’s no different to be a substitute than it is to be a Spring Grove part-time employee.”

Barbara Valencia

Substitutes at Spring Grove are even offered the same benefits as part-time employees, just another example of Spring Grove’s commitment to its most vital resource — its people. Ultimately, what Barbara wants Spring Grove substitutes to know that working with the district isn’t a one-time, one-off experience — substitutes are part of the team.

Customer service for substitute teachers means treating them like family. Get more sub engagement tips #k12

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Seeing Positive Results

What Barbara and Spring Grove have managed to accomplish with a simple adherence to a singularly important factor — placing the emphasis on people — is significant.

  • Spring Grove is on track for a 94-99% fill rate. That’s up from 84-93% before they started using Frontline Absence & Time, their employee absence management software.
  • When Barbara first joined the district in 2015, they had about 50 substitutes who worked regularly. Now? 155 regular substitutes.
  • Perhaps more importantly, Barbara regularly hears that substitutes love teaching at Spring Grove, largely because they feel appreciated and supported.

99%

Increase in Fill Rate from a low of 84%

150

Increased Substitute pool from about 50 substitutes in the pool to 150 who regularly cover classes in the district.

100%

Feedback from substitutes is that they feel increasingly happy, appreciated, and supported at Spring Grove.

Looking Forward

“I had one substitute who made sure that she caught me at the end of an event that we were having at one of the schools and took me aside and said, ‘I can’t believe that I was so scared to substitute because I found that, when I was in the classroom, I was enjoying the kids so much that we got through everything we needed to and were able to accomplish all the teacher’s goals for the day and it wasn’t like it was work.’”

Barbara Valencia

That’s a far cry from a self-conscious substitute, tossed into a classroom they don’t recognize, struggling just to get their bearings.

Barbara credits a long-term view of the district’s future, coupled with their newfound commitment to customer service, for the improvements in Spring Grove. But none of it would have been possible without her early career experiences as a sub.

“I knew, first-hand, what it felt like to be that substitute, brand new in the system,” Barbara says. “So, I wanted to change the culture and the feeling substitutes would have when they come to Spring Grove.”

Barbara Valencia

Through a focus on substitute customer service, Barbara and Spring Grove have managed to build a reputation for being a great place to work—a reputation that has served, and continues to serve, the district well in filling unexpected teacher vacancies, hiring the best candidates for the district and improving outcomes for Spring Grove students.

5 Ways to Reduce Burnout for Special Education Teachers

When I became principal for a specialized school with various sites throughout a borough in New York City, one of my first priorities was to develop a plan of action to better support my special education staff.

Here’s why:

At the time, I was struggling in my newly assigned school. I had just hired two new administrators, opened a new inclusion site and hired twenty-one staff members, including teachers, paraprofessionals and related service providers.

Just as I thought the year was settling in, one of my first-year, highly qualified special education teachers came to me in tears. Her dream was to be a teacher. She loved children and was so thrilled to be an educator in the field of special education. She kept telling herself that things would get easier ― however, the sleepless nights and spending all of her free time planning lessons and materials for her students was just too much for her.

Although we did have curricula that offered tiered level materials, this teacher needed to break down instruction even further to meet the needs of her students. And there were other challenges she had to conquer:

  • Training her paraprofessionals to support instruction and collect data daily
  • Scheduling instructional days to meet mandates around related services
  • Navigating a myriad of emotional challenges in her classroom

She was spiraling downhill trying to coordinate her own emotions and keep up with paperwork, and it was taking a toll on her physical and mental health.

“She was spiraling downhill trying to coordinate her own emotions and keep up with paperwork, and it was taking a toll on her physical and mental health.”

Though special education teachers are often passionate and resilient individuals, they are twice as likely to leave the profession as their general education colleagues.[1] One of the reasons they leave is because they simply burn out.

Unique Challenges Faced by Special Education Teachers

With the national push to take students with disabilities out of self-contained environments and provide them with opportunities to spend part of or all of their days in general education classrooms, the ability to effectively teach students in special education is more critical today than ever before.

Each student brings with them their blueprint, as documented in their Individual Education Plan (IEP), which may include mandates to provide a variety of related services to help support students to progress. Many students have multiple services and classifications and are often years behind academically. Some of these students are mandated for mainstreaming or inclusion services in general education classes. This means even one small, self-contained class can have students within a three-year age span, with multiple individual needs, learning at different levels and with different styles. What a daunting task for any educator!

I needed to create an inclusive culture and climate that was beneficial to adult and student learning.

5 Ways School Leaders Can Reduce Burnout in Special Educators

As an administrator and an educator for over 35 years, I have been through the changing mandates of teaching students with disabilities, and I have experienced how these changes affect the passionate educators with whom I work.

My goal as a school leader was to support and empower teachers to collaborate, and to provide coherent, rigorous instructional and social-emotional support to the school community. This new kind of school environment improved the emotional state of many teachers, including special educators, and allowed me and my administrative team to focus on improving teacher practices and student achievement.

Here are five strategies we used to turn the tide in our school.

1. Emotional Intelligence

Creating a bond of trust gives insight into what others may be feeling or thinking; it helped me, as a principal, understand how and why members of my special education staff were reacting to situations in certain ways.

As a leader, it was necessary for me to have self-awareness and manage my emotions, to move the school community to a desired, cohesive vision by making informed decisions on how to communicate and support teachers and provide staff development.

2. Teacher Surveys

Through teacher surveys, we were able to consistently offer differentiated professional development opportunities and provide meaningful feedback to our special education teachers. We sought input from all members of the school community through regular meetings. Teachers are not superheroes. They can’t possibly be effective without the support and collaboration of a school-based team. Our school motto was, “Teamwork in the best interest of children.”

“This new kind of school environment improved the emotional state of many teachers, including special educators.”

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3. Examining Data

Teacher inquiry teams through distributive leadership — in collaboration with the instructional cabinet — examined trends and targeted student and teacher supports needed through the use of a wide range of formative assessments. The teams provided opportunities for veteran special education teachers to mentor new teachers to look at data and identify trends.

Data revealed an overwhelming pattern of challenging behaviors that would require intervention across all of my sites in order for teachers to effectively manage their classrooms and ensure successful instructional outcomes for students. It was important that the entire school community implement both a coherent school-wide, positive-behavior system and best instructional practices.

“Data revealed an overwhelming pattern of challenging behaviors that would require intervention across all of my sites in order for teachers to successfully manage their classrooms.”

4. Proactive Teamwork

We established two academic teams, one for Alternately Assessed Students and one for Standardized Assessed Students. Staff worked together to create a lesson-plan template that embedded instructional shifts, coherent instruction and best teaching practices that reflected a clear set of beliefs. This helped ensure all students had entry into learning that demonstrated high levels of thinking, ownership, participation and behavior expectation.

Working as a team provided support and opportunities for special education staff to look at student performance data and calibrate the results. Team members researched best practices together to implement strategies and support instruction throughout the day, promoting positive student outcomes.

“Working as a team provided support and opportunities for #specialeducation staff to look at student performance data and calibrate the results.”

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Innovative scheduling was implemented as a necessary step to providing individual or small group support for students during class instruction, rather than students being pulled out for a related service one-to-one session – which would have resulted in instructional time loss. This scheduling technique involved assigning related services staff to specific classes and delivering services within the classroom, as long as the sessions were not therapeutic and could be carried out in a classroom setting.

5. Role-based Training for Paraprofessionals

It was also essential that special education teachers were given additional time to meet specifically with paraprofessionals to train and plan for the instructional day. Training paraprofessionals to implement instruction and adapt materials to support students was a needed component to assist in daily instruction. This training would allow the teacher to have more time to teach without stopping in the middle of a lesson to direct paraprofessionals on how to support students.

Key Learning: An Inclusive Work Environment & Clear Expectations Reduce Burnout in Special Education Teachers

Monitoring, adapting and modifying instruction for students with various classifications on multi-grade levels every day is exhausting — there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Providing tools to empower staff to work together to create a coherent, positive school environment with clear expectations for both students and staff reduces frustration for special educators.

Will it always be easy? Absolutely not. However, teachers don’t have to do it all alone. School leadership can use creative scheduling and teamwork to help support teachers in identifying entry points of learning — and assist in closing the achievement gap for students. Collaboration lets staff take ownership of researching academic and emotional strategies that can be embedded into instructional best practices.

With the help of your staff and the use of round-table decision-making and emotional intelligence strategies, it is possible to create a great support system for your special educators using existing school resources!

Want to reduce the likelihood that your special educators will leave their posts due to burnout? Learn how Frontline Special Ed & Interventions helps them spend less energy on paperwork and re-engage in delivering innovative student support.

Professional Development Program Evaluation: Using Surveys, Interviews, Focus Groups and Observations

In the previous article in this series on evaluating teacher professional development, I shared that evaluation questions drive data collection and asked, “How would we know what data to collect, and from whom, if we haven’t settled on the questions we’re asking?” Once we have settled on a small set (about 1-3) of evaluation questions, we set our sights on how to collect data to answer them.

There are a multitude of ways to collect data to answer evaluation questions. Surveys (aka questionnaires), interviews, focus groups and observation are the most commonly used, and each has distinct advantages and disadvantages.

You’ll choose data collection strategies based on these along with which align best with your evaluation questions.

Let’s take a quick look at each strategy:

Surveys

A survey is “an instrument or tool used for data collection composed of a series of questions administered to a group of people either in person, through the mail, over the phone, or online” (Robinson & Leonard, 2019, p. xiii). Surveys tend to have mostly closed-ended items — questions that have a question stem or statement, and a set of pre-determined response options (answer choices) or a rating scale. However, many surveys also include one or more open-ended questions that allow respondents — the people taking the survey — the opportunity to write in their own answers.

Many surveys are still administered on paper, but they’re conducted more frequently now in online environments. Professional development management systems, such as Frontline Professional Growth, allow feedback forms to be attached to professional development courses, and also feature the ability to construct and administer follow-up surveys.

The main advantage of a survey is that it can reach a large number of respondents. With electronic platforms, one click can send a survey to hundreds or thousands of respondents. Survey data is also relatively easy to analyze, and allows for easy comparison of answers across groups (such as elementary vs high school teachers, or different cohorts of participants). The main disadvantage is that we lack the opportunity to ask respondents follow-up questions, and quantitative survey data isn’t often as rich and detailed as data that result from interviews and focus groups.

4 ways to collect data when evaluating your professional development program: surveys, interviews, focus groups and observations.

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Interviews

An interview is a set of questions asked in person or over the phone to one individual at a time. It’s essentially a conversation between interviewer and respondent. In contrast to surveys, interviews are largely composed of open-ended questions with the interviewer taking notes or recording respondents’ answers for later analysis. Interviewers can use “probes” to elicit more detailed information from respondents. Probes are specific follow-up questions based on how a respondent answers, or they can be more generic, such as, “Can you say more about that?”

An interview’s main advantage is that it allows us to deeply understand a respondent’s perspective and experience. An interview can give us a strong sense of how someone experienced new learning from professional development, and how that learning plays out in their teaching practice. The main disadvantage is that we usually don’t have time to interview more than a handful of people, unlike the hundreds of responses we can collect with surveys. Interview data is also qualitative, and thus a bit time-consuming to analyze.

Focus Groups

A focus group is simply a group interview. Typically a small group of people (ideally about 6-8)  are brought together and asked a set of questions as a group. While one focus group member may answer a question first, others then chime in and offer their own answers, react to what others have said, agree, disagree, etc. The focus group functions like a discussion. It’s best to have both an interviewer and a notetaker and to video record for later review and analysis.

The main advantage of a focus group is that when people respond to questions in a group setting, they build off each others’ answers. Often, the conversation inspires respondents to think of something they may not have remembered otherwise. Also, focus groups allow us to interview more people than individual interviews. The main disadvantage is the same as with interviews — we can still reach only a small number of people, and since the resulting data is qualitative, it can take time to analyze.

Observations

Observing teachers and students in action can be one of the best ways to capture rich data about how teacher professional learning plays out in the classroom. Typically, observers use a protocol informed by the evaluation questions that outlines what the observer is looking for and what data to collect during the classroom visit.

The main advantage of observations is in witnessing first-hand how curriculum is being implemented, how instructional strategies are being used and how students are responding. The main disadvantage is in the potential for conflict, especially if positive relationships and trust aren’t a strong part of the school culture. While many teachers willingly invite observers into their classrooms, there can be tensions among colleagues and with unions who want to ensure that program evaluation does not influence teacher evaluation. It is critical to clearly communicate that data collected for professional development program evaluation is not to be used for teacher evaluation.

It’s critical to communicate to teachers & staff that data collected for professional development program evaluation is not to be used for teacher evaluation. — @SheilaBRobinson

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A Few Recommended Practices

Do engage stakeholders, such as teachers and administrators, in all phases of program evaluation. Be transparent in letting people know why they are participating in data collection, why program evaluation is important to the department or district and what potential decisions may rest on the outcome. If people understand why program evaluation is being conducted and the role it plays in the organization, they will be much more likely to participate.

Don’t collect data you don’t need. For example, if you don’t need to compare how the program worked for 3rd grade vs 4th grade teachers, don’t ask them to provide their grade level. If you don’t plan to compare male and female teachers, or newer vs veteran teachers, don’t ask these questions.

Do keep the data collection brief. Have you ever known a teacher or administrator with loads of extra time in their schedule? Whether it’s an interview, focus group or survey, keep it brief by asking only the questions you need answers to.

Do incentivize responses to maximize the number of responses you receive. If possible, have light refreshments available for focus groups (minding rules for spending grants or general funds). Offer survey respondents raffle tickets for a good education book, a bag of school supplies, a gift card, etc. There are ways to keep survey responses anonymous while knowing who completed them for these types of incentives. Offer an extra planning period (coverage for a class or release from an administrative assignment) to interviewees.

Do find ways of working data collection into professional learning program activities — e.g., participant journals, pre-post assessments, logs (teachers might log how often they use a strategy or resource, and comment on how it worked with students), etc. The less people have to do outside of the professional learning program, the better.

Do think creatively about data collection. Student work samples, photos and videos are legitimate forms of data that can be analyzed to look for patterns that help to answer evaluation questions.

In collecting data for #PD program evaluation, DO keep it brief, engage stakeholders, incentivize responses and be creative, but DON’T waste time collecting data you don’t need! — @SheilaBRobinson

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Next up in the series is what to do with all the data you collect: analysis and interpretation.

Reference:
Robinson, S.B. & Leonard, K.F. (2019). Designing Quality Survey Questions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Next Up In the Series:

In Part 6, we dive deeper into Effective Strategies for Analyzing Professional Development Data.

Using Data to Set & Reach Your Teacher Hiring Goals

Across your district, teachers and principals are using data to set goals and evaluate their performance. It should be natural that data-driven decision-making and strategic goal-setting are par for the course in the central office as well. When it comes to some of the most essential work in the district — recruiting and hiring exceptional educators — there’s often a lack of actionable goals and strategic use of data.

It’s understandable. Administrators working in Human Resources face an avalanche of tasks which often involve short deadlines and a dizzying amount of back-and forth. But by setting aside time to establish goals, you’ll have the structure you need to develop an effective strategy for continual improvement.

So, what goals should you set for recruiting and hiring? It all depends on your district’s unique situation. Let’s take a walk through the steps you need to take in order to set actionable (and attainable) goals for recruiting and hiring.

Step 1: Gather Hiring Data

The most actionable goals are based on a thorough review of your district’s data. So, you will need to pull together your recruiting and hiring data. If you have the right software, this is a breeze. But if not, this could be the hardest part of goal-setting — if your hiring process is based on paper, you will have some difficulty getting the full picture of your district’s trends. Or, if you manage your hiring through an inefficient HRIS system, you may need to get in touch with your IT department to export the data.

In any case, gather as much recruiting and hiring data as possible. Without this step, you might be able to come up with objectives, but you’ll be ill-equipped to track your progress toward them.

You may want to take a few minutes to reflect on this data-gathering process. If you had any difficulty accessing the data you need, or find any inaccuracies or gaps, consider setting a goal to make your data more visible and easier to use.

Step 2: Ask the Right Questions

Look closely at your district’s data and look for patterns. It may be most helpful to look for changes over the past several years and year-over-year trends, if the data is available. If not, it’s perfectly fine to start with the past year.

Ask yourself: Which data points are surprising to you? Why do you think the data shows one trend or another? What improvements would you like to see? Don’t forget to recognize and celebrate where you are doing well already.

A few specific areas to consider, and questions to ask:

New Hires & Applicant Pools

Look closely at who your district has hired. What do you notice about the population of new teachers? Is this what you would expect to see? Were you able to fill all of your open positions, or are still some waiting for the right candidate to come along?

Next, compare your new hire data to your applicant pool and note any differences you see. You may want to examine whether new hires disproportionately come from any particular recruitment channel, or if they tend to have a certain experience in common. For example, do word-of-mouth referrals represent a disproportionately large percentage of new hires? Or do you tend to hire heavily from your substitute teacher pool, or educators who started out as student teachers in your district?

You may also want to look at the volume of high-quality candidates, particularly by subject areas. Did you have enough high-quality applicants to select from overall? What about for shortage-prone positions like Special Education, STEM or speech pathology? And are you confident that the best candidates were hired, or is it possible that some may have slipped through the cracks?

For even better insight, take a look at retention rates for last year’s new hires, benchmarked against your overall retention rate. This will give you a better idea of how well your hiring process selects candidates who fit into the school culture.

The Hiring Timeline

The next step is exploring metrics like time-to-hire, and when most candidates were hired. By looking at how long it takes to fill most vacancies, you may be able to identify inefficient processes that hold up the hiring process. And by identifying which positions take the longest to fill, you’ll know where to put more of your recruitment resources.

Plus, you’ll be able to determine how early in the year you should start hiring to have positions filled. Remember that hiring late in the year means less-qualified applicant pools, so if most of your jobs are filled in late July and August, you could be missing out on the most talented candidates.

Dig into what could be causing jobs to not be posted until late summer. How can you predict staffing needs more accurately?

The Hiring Experience

Finally, you may want to gather input from individuals involved in hiring, from your new hires to principals. Consider sending out a survey asking new hires for feedback on the application and hiring process. For principals, consider sending a survey asking for their opinion on the quality of the applicant pool and the hiring process itself — were they satisfied with the level of support they received from Human Resources? Did they notice any inefficiencies that could be addressed?

Gathering feedback from those involved in hiring across the district allows you to go beyond hiring data alone and understand how others perceive the process. Plus, it fosters collaboration and engagement by showing that you care about their experience. And in the end, it will help you provide a more positive experience for applicants and administrators alike.

Step 3: Set Preliminary Goals and Actions

After working your way through the data, determine what your district needs to focus on for the upcoming year and set objective, clearly-defined goals that are aligned to those areas of improvement. These should be realistic — it’s good to have a few “stretch” goals, but ultimately, all of your objectives should be achievable. If you currently receive 40 applications a year for hard-to-staff positions across the district, don’t set a goal of having 250 next year.

A reasonable number of feasible goals will give you the structure you need to develop effective, targeted strategies, without overwhelming yourself or your colleagues.

Lay out your recruiting and hiring goals for the coming year and build a framework for a strategy to help you improve on those metrics and meet your goals. The more integrated that strategy is, the more effectively you’ll be able to improve your hiring across the board with less effort. But don’t stop there — to really ensure success, think about your goals forward and backward.

To ensure success, it’s essential to think about your hiring goals forward and backward.

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Thinking forward comes naturally: I want X, so I will implement Y strategy to get there. Thinking backwards — or inverting the problem — means asking yourself, What would prevent me from reaching my goal? What should I do to make sure those things don’t happen? You might realize that your district is inadvertently doing something that holds your recruitment and hiring processes back. Then, you can make a change and ensure that nothing stands between you and your goals.

For example, if your goal is to find more applicants, you could “think forward” by allocating more time and money to attending more job fairs, both locally and out-of-state. But by “thinking backward” you might realize that plenty more job-seekers might apply to your district, if only your application process were more applicant-friendly. By no longer requiring job-seekers to apply in-person or send a thick packet through snail mail, you may find that more qualified educators apply to work in the district.

Step 4: Track Your Progress

After implementing any changes to your hiring process or strategy, the next step is to continually monitor your data. Don’t let yourself be surprised at the end of the year — you’re more likely to meet your goals when you can track your progress toward them and adjust course as needed.

This step shouldn’t be a burden, either. Just like you expect educators to embed data into their daily work, set aside 5-10 minutes once a week to check in on your progress. Even if the rest of your day is consumed by putting out fires and you don’t have time to immediately act on the data, you’ll be in a better position to stay on top of what’s happening in the district.

By setting goals based on your district’s hiring trends and tracking your progress against them, you’ll be able to strategically improve your teacher recruiting and hiring strategies.

With the Insights Dashboard in Frontline Recruiting & Hiring, your recruiting and hiring data is at your fingertips. You can monitor trends, plan ahead and maximize your recruiting efforts, without needing to dig through paperwork or spreadsheets.

6 Best Practices to Elevate IEPs

The individualized education program (IEP) is the seminal planning document for teaching students with disabilities, and the Present Levels of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance (PLAAFP) section should be its heart and soul. When done well, the PLAAFP describes a multi-dimensional student — one with strengths, interests, needs and aspirations. I’ve provided suggestions on how the PLAAFP can tell “the right story” for each student — let’s review some of these ideas and connect the dots so your PLAAFPs can set the stage for compliant, individualized and relevant IEPs.

Here are 6 best practices to help guide your IEP process.

1. Use Multiple Sources of Data to Build Comprehensive IEPs

The foundation of a compliant and relevant IEP is built upon the analysis and synthesis of multiple sources of data. Information obtained in the initial and 3-year re-evaluations is essential — however, don’t overlook the range of other data readily available or easily obtained on each student.

Collect direct feedback from students, parents and teachers about the student’s strengths and needs. Use progress monitoring data and progress reports to supplement present levels each year. And don’t overlook the information on functional performance you can get during formal observations.

2. Focus on Student Strengths, Interests and Preferences

Framing student strengths, interests and preferences (S-I-P) sets a positive tone in the PLAAFP and acknowledges that a student is so much more than his or her disability. As important, S-I-Ps are essential to good instructional planning. Identifying each student’s S-I-Ps should result in actionable information for educators.

For example, consider this question: “Now that I have this information, how can I use it to improve instruction for this student?” S-I-Ps, in essence, are instructional tools — they inform the selection of materials, strategies and reinforcers that result in engaging and accessible instruction.

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IEP Checklist for Teachers

3. Increase Parent Participation in the IEP Process

It’s important for parents to feel confident that school personnel know their child as an individual. Prior to the IEP meeting, reach out to obtain parental insights about their child and ideas they have for improving his or her school experience.

Help parents prepare for the meeting by providing them with some sentence starters. For example, “My child is really good at ______,” “My child is easily frustrated when ______,” “This would be a successful school year if my child ______.”

Seeing evidence of their input included in their child’s IEP can go a long way to support parents and increase their participation in the IEP process. Similarly, make sure parents have all the same information other team members have prior to the meeting. Prepared parents can be more engaged parents.

4. Describe How the Student’s Disability Affects Involvement and Progress in the General Education Curriculum

The essential question answered by the PLAAFP is, “How does the student’s disability affect involvement and progress in the general education curriculum?” Special education eligibility is conditioned on the student’s disability adversely affecting involvement and progress in the general education curriculum. The PLAAFP requires a description of HOW progress is affected.

The #IEP is the baton that gets passed from year to year; teacher to teacher.

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For each PLAAFP statement, ask yourself, does this statement pass the “stranger test?” Could someone who does not know the student visualize the disability-related characteristics this student manifests as they function in the demands of the school environment?

When the student’s characteristics are out of alignment with the demands, there will be an adverse impact on the student’s involvement and progress. By aligning the student’s disability-related characteristics with authentic school demands, the student’s needs become apparent to the IEP Team.

5. Write Specific Statements on Academic and Functional Needs

This section of the IEP provides additional details to identify the student’s academic and functional needs. Describe the skills and behaviors the student demonstrates (“can do”) and compare them to the overall expectations (“expected to do”) with the curriculum. This gap analysis helps prioritize the student’s most urgent needs and provides the rationale for subsequent IEP goals, supports and services.

  • Academic needs are typically those associated with basic skill acquisition, reading, writing, oral communication and math.
  • Functional needs are those that affect a student’s ability to apply skills/knowledge to a range of domains, including communication, motor daily living, organization and more.

“Gap analysis helps prioritize the student’s most urgent needs and provides the rationale for subsequent IEP goals, supports and services.”

6. Establish Baseline Data to Take a Student’s Performance Temperature

With the student’s most urgent needs identified, the stage is set to select goals. Goals must be measurable and targeted — stating a specific and observable skill or behavior the student will do by the end of the IEP cycle. In other words, you’re asking yourself, “If the proposed interventions are successful, what will I see the student do in a year?”

Baseline data is important because it measures how well the student currently performs that skill before the intervention. Not to be confused with the most recent evaluations, think of baseline data as the “present tense” of the subsequent goals.

For example, if the goal is to increase a student’s time on task during independent seatwork, the baseline is how long the student is currently able to remain on task during independent seatwork. This information will help with IEP goal tracking. With this information, the team can determine the degree of change necessary for the student to reach a challenging and attainable goal.

Read More About Establishing Baseline Data  

Connecting the Dots for Each IEP

Teachers get to know their students well over time — but a well-written PLAAFP accelerates basic knowledge of a student on day 1. The IEP is the baton that gets passed from year to year; teacher to teacher. The PLAAFP paints a picture of the student so anyone receiving the baton can plan meaningful instruction for the student. It will provide teachers with the vital information they need to begin instruction and implement accommodations. Additionally, a well-written PLAAFP will show parents their child is known and valued as an individual.

Through a collaborative process, each student’s PLAAFP can elevate the IEP document from a compliant document to one that tells the right story about who each student is and what he or she needs to have a successful school year.

Looking to make the entire IEP process, including IEP goal tracking, more intuitive and less paperwork intensive for teachers in your organization? Dial down the stress levels with Frontline Special Ed & Interventions.

Dr. Jim Knight: Videotaping Lessons as Professional Development for Teachers

“Video is a central part of my own personal growth, because you need feedback to grow. You need to see where you are, you need to see where you’re trying to get to. So it’s a key part of what I do, not just professionally but personally.”

Dr. Jim Knight is widely known in the world of instructional coaching. He is president of the Instructional Coaching Group, and author of such books as The Impact Cycle: What Instructional Coaches Should Do to Foster Powerful Improvements in Teaching and High-Impact Instruction: A Framework for Great Teaching.

In 2014, he also wrote a book called Focus on Teaching: Using Video for High-Impact Instruction. Recently, he joined me for an interview about how teachers, principals, coaches and teams can all use self-produced videos of classroom lessons to advance teaching practice.

 

[Note: this interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.]

FRONTLINE EDUCATION: Dr. Knight, you’ve written and spoken about the use of video for high-impact instruction quite a bit. We really have to start with thinking about video itself. Why is video important for educators to consider?

JIM KNIGHT: We’ve seen the power of video in lots of other fields. You wouldn’t have a football team in America that doesn’t watch themselves on video, and lots of performing artists watch themselves on video. The reason why I think video is so important is that it provides you with a picture of reality you can’t get while you’re actually doing the job.

A hockey player, for example, might not know how out of position he is unless he sees the video, and when he sees the video he goes, “Holy smokes, I had no idea.” That’s why athletes, whether they’re in a middle school or in a university or whether they’re professional athletes watch themselves on video all the time. It’s the same thing with teachers, we’ve found…. Most people don’t have a very clear picture of what it looks like when they have conversations or when they do their work.

FRONTLINE EDUCATION: I can imagine someone saying, “I don’t think my teachers are going to be comfortable with it.”

JIM KNIGHT: Well the first thing I’d say is that they’re probably right. It is hard to watch yourself on video. We don’t like the way we look, and often we’re a little disappointed with our practice. But the way forward, the way to get better isn’t by avoiding reality, it’s by looking reality full-on. Video gives you a clearer picture of reality, and after a few times, you get used to it, and then it just becomes a tool you use.

The first time is kind of like hearing your voice for the first time on a recording to the power of ten. The way you move, what your voice sounds like — all kinds of things are a little disconcerting, but once you get used to it, you’re good.

We see it varies more by school than it does by person. In other words, if you wanted to introduce video in a school, likely either almost everybody would do it, or hardly anybody would do it. It’s not really an individual thing, it’s a culture thing. I think the issue is, if people feel psychologically safe, and they feel they can trust the people they work with, then they’re good. But if people don’t feel psychologically safe, they’re not going to open themselves up to a judgmental situation.

FRONTLINE EDUCATION: Your book discusses a number of ways that video can be used to improve teaching, by teachers themselves, by coaches, by principals and by teams. If I’m a coach, I can already observe teachers in the classroom, so what else does video bring to the table?

JIM KNIGHT: Well the trouble is that people often don’t have clear picture of current reality because of a number of different perceptual errors. I’m not just talking about teachers. We have a tendency to look for data — what’s called “confirmation bias” — that reinforces our perceptions of things. We also get used to stuff over time, what’s called “habituation.” What we think is happening and what’s really happening are often quite a bit different.

Videos of classroom lessons can help teachers curb habituation and confirmation bias. -Jim Knight

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Video also allows us a chance to see things we might not see. It doesn’t have to be negative, necessarily. Sometimes a coach will video record a class, and the teacher will say, “I heard my kids talking and I couldn’t believe how supportive and encouraging they were, it was really a wonderful thing to see.” Or, “I realize when I watched the video, the kids actually understood the activity even before I started.” So sometimes they’ll see things that are good, not necessarily bad. It provides a bigger picture.

FRONTLINE EDUCATION: As you’ve spoken with teachers who have done this, what are the kinds of things that they’ve said to you that they’ve seen or come away with?

JIM KNIGHT: Sharon Thomas, who was a teacher in Maryland, she now works with us. She said when she watches it, it’s like the MacGuffin effect in Hitchcock movies. She always sits down expecting to see one thing and she’s looking for that one thing, but then as she watches the video, it always ends up being something else than what she thought. And I’ve heard that from other people too, that their expectation of what they’re going to see in the video, and what they really see, is quite a bit different.

FRONTLINE EDUCATION: What are the biggest hurdles that schools and districts face in using video to support improvements in practice?

JIM KNIGHT: The biggest hurdle is the culture of the school…. If [as a teacher] I know they’ve got my best interest at heart, it’s going to be pretty easy for me to agree, but if I’m not sure of that, I’m going to hesitate. I’d say it’s really important to create a culture where that’s going to happen.

A second thing is not just psychological safety. Sometimes there’s a culture of talk versus a culture of action — we do workshops all the time, and we talk about evaluation, and we do school improvement but nothing really changes. When you use video, the moment you push the red button on your phone or tablet, you move from a culture of talk to a culture of action. Once you look at the video, something has to happen, and in some systems it’s counter-cultural to actually be working on really doing things.

Jim Knight: “When you use video [for teachers to self-reflect on classroom lessons], you move from a culture of talk to a culture of action.”

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FRONTLINE EDUCATION: Is there anything else you’d add?

JIM KNIGHT: There’s a kind of a paradox at the heart of all of this: to live a fulfilling life, you have to be getting better. If you just stay the same all the time, something kind of shrivels up inside you. You impoverish your life if you don’t grow and learn. That’s why there are so many self-help books. To get better you have to face reality, and that can be painful, so the initial experience of getting better doesn’t seem like it’s nourishing your well-being at all. But you’re not going to get to the point of feeling like you’re really improving and growing unless you look at reality. So ironically, to get better you have to feel worse first. You have to learn where you are.

Right now, I’m trying to get in shape so I can run more, and that means I have to lose weight and I have to look at the scales every day and go, “Oh, I never should’ve had those chips and salsa.” I have to see reality every day and maybe it’s a little painful, but to get better you have to see it, and that’s a really interesting dynamic about the use of video.

Sometimes people would rather not see reality because it hurts too much to look at reality. But in the long run, to really feel fulfilled they have to be getting better.

This was just a small excerpt from a longer interview. Listen to the entire interview above, or subscribe to the podcast..

The Value of Providing Feedback for Substitutes

With each new school year you work hard to ensure that everyone is ready, from bus drivers to teachers. But we’d like to suggest one more thing to consider: committing to providing feedback to substitute teachers throughout the school year.. You’ll help your substitutes become more effective in the classroom and gain more visibility into your sub pool’s performance across the district.

We’ve written a lot about the value of feedback , particularly as it relates to teachers’ professional growth. But substitutes are often left out of these discussions, even though they’re essential to your district’s operations. Plus, remember the impact they have on student learning: students spend the equivalent of about two-thirds of a school year with substitute teachers over the course of their K-12 journey. That’s a lot of instructional time! So, it’s important to help your substitutes make the most of their time in the classroom by having teachers provide regular, honest feedback.

How to Provide Feedback for Substitute Teachers

Have your teachers get in the habit of documenting substitute performance where possible, and make sure that it’s made available for the substitute to see.

Try not to have substitute feedback communicated over email — you won’t have much visibility as an administrator into which substitutes are doing well and which aren’t. Instead, consider using an electronic system where teachers can provide feedback online. Teachers’ comments will be more consistent across the district, and substitutes will be better informed as to how they can better improve their skills as educators. It’s a good way to engage with substitutes and show that you see them as part of the educational community.

Even more importantly, by managing substitute feedback online, you’ll gain insight into your substitute pool’s effectiveness. For example, you’ll be able to:

  • See which substitutes may benefit from additional support or training
  • See which may not be the right fit for your district.
  • Address any possible issues that may arise, before they become a problem for the district.
  • Identify high-performing substitutes to recognize — whether on social media, at district events or at a Substitute Appreciation Tea.

Regular Substitute Teacher Feedback is Crucial

To get the full picture of substitute effectiveness, regular feedback is crucial. If teachers only leave comments from time to time, you won’t have context as to how substitutes perform on a daily basis. So, encourage teachers to leave feedback for substitutes after every absence. An electronic system like Frontline Absence & Time can automatically remind employees to leave feedback for substitutes, so it doesn’t fall through the cracks.

Make sure that teachers have a set of questions to answer about their experience with the substitute. If you leave it completely open-ended, you won’t have consistent reviews and may not get the information you’re looking for. By default, Frontline’s system asks the following questions, although they can be edited or customized to your heart’s desire:

  • Was classroom work collected?
  • Was the room left as neat and clean as it was found?
  • Was classroom work explained satisfactorily?
  • Did students report that they were treated fairly and consistently?
  • Were any disciplinary issues reported?
  • General notes/comments

By collecting and offering regular feedback, you can help your substitute pool be as effective as possible — which ultimately benefits students. So, make sure that your substitute management plan for the year includes a strategy to collect and act on teacher feedback.

Learn more about how Frontline Absence & Time can support your district.

Evaluating Professional Development for Teachers? Evaluation Questions Are the Linchpin.

Edwards Deming, famous American management consultant, once quipped, “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.”

Evaluation questions form the cornerstone of professional development program evaluation. They both frame and focus the work, pointing us in the right direction for data collection. After all, how would we know what data to collect, and from whom, if we haven’t settled on the questions we’re asking? Crafting the right questions for a particular evaluation project is critical to an effective evaluation effort.

What are evaluation questions?

Think of evaluation questions as research questions. They are broad questions that usually cannot be answered with a simple yes or no, and require collecting and analyzing data to answer. Most importantly, these are not the individual questions we would ask someone on a survey (we’ll get to those in the future!).

Evaluation questions are big picture questions that get at program characteristics and are evaluative. That is, the answers to these questions will help us understand the importance, the quality or the value of our programs.

Well-conceived evaluation questions help us to understand the importance, quality and value of our professional development programs in K-12.

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Imagine you are evaluating a professional development program. What do you need to investigate? To answer this, let’s take a quick step back. The previous article in this series showed how to engage stakeholders and generate shared understanding of how our professional learning programs work by creating program descriptions, logic models, and a program theory. Now, we’ll see what you can do with these products to focus your evaluation!

Identifying information needs and decisions

First, consider what you need to know about your professional learning program. This may depend on what decisions you (or others) have to make about it. Do you need to decide whether to continue offering the program? Offer it to an expanded audience or at multiple sites? Eliminate it altogether? Try a different program to address the problem at hand (e.g. improving middle school writing skills)?

Once you’ve identified decisions that need to be made, revisit those three products — program description, logic model and program theory. What are the implicit or explicit assumptions being made about the program? For example, does the program theory state that the professional learning will change teachers’ thinking? Encourage them to use new strategies or resources in their teaching practice? Does the logic model identify certain expected outcomes for students?

Determining the questions

You may be thinking at this point, “Well, we just need to know if our program is working.” To that I would ask, “What do you mean by working?”

“Well,” you might say, “We want to know if the program is effective.” And I would answer with another question: “What do you mean by effective?”

And so it would go until you can define and describe exactly what you are looking for.

Again, revisit your three documents. As you review the program description and program theory, what clues do you have about what it should look like if the program is working or effective? Try to describe this scenario in as much detail as possible. Here’s an example:

If our professional learning program on writing instruction for middle school teachers is working (or effective, or successful…) we would hear teachers saying that they’ve tried the new strategies they learned, and are now using them in their daily practice. They would be able to show us how they are now teaching writing using the new templates. They would be able to show us “before” and “after” examples of student writing, and be able to describe in specific ways how students’ writing has improved.

Once we have defined success, we can turn these ideas into evaluation questions. One of my favorite tricks for doing this is to ask “To what extent…” questions. For the example above, these questions might look like this:

  • To what extent are teachers using the new writing instruction strategies?
  • To what extent are teachers using the writing template?
  • To what extent are teachers able to identify and show specific improvements in students’ writing?

Posing these questions may also inspire some sub-questions:

  • To what extent are teachers using the new writing instruction strategies?
    • How many teachers have tried the strategies at least once?
    • How many teachers are using the strategies twice per week or more often?
  • To what extent are teachers using the writing template?
    • How many teachers are using the writing template at least once per week?
    • To what extent are teachers using the template as given, or modifying it for their classrooms?
  • To what extent are teachers able to identify and show specific improvements in students’ writing?
    • What specific improvements are teachers identifying?
    • To what extent do the improvements we are seeing match the writing deficits we identified when we started the program?

As you can see, your list of evaluation questions can grow quite long! In fact, you may be able to identify dozens of potential evaluation questions. To keep the evaluation feasible, prioritize these and settle on perhaps just 1-2 big questions, especially if each has a couple of sub-questions.

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Need more inspiration?

Here are generic examples of the types of evaluation questions you may need to ask. Some questions might be formative in nature. That is, they may be used to inform potential changes in the program. Think of these as process questions or implementation questions.

  • Is the program reaching the right people? (In other words, are the people we want to be enrolling in the program doing so?)
  • Is the program being delivered (implemented) as intended?
  • In what ways (if any) does the implementation of the program differ from the program description?

Other questions might be summative in nature. These questions ask about outcomes, impacts or changes that occur that we believe can be attributed to the program.

  • To what extent is the program producing the expected outcomes (i.e., achieving its goals)?
  • How do the effects of the program vary across participants? (i.e., are different teachers experiencing different results?)
  • What evidence do we have that the program is effective in meeting its stated goals and objectives?
  • How can the program be improved?
  • Is the program worth the resources expended (i.e., the costs)?

Using a checklist may be helpful in determining whether your questions are appropriate and will be effective.

It’s critical to craft the right questions when evaluating #professionaldevelopment for teachers.

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Evaluation questions lead to data collection

As we have learned previously, we can conceive of program evaluation as occurring in five phases: Engagement and Understanding, Evaluation Questions, Data Collection, Data Analysis and Interpretation, and Reporting and Use.

As you can see from the above examples, evaluation questions point us to where and from whom to collect data. If our question is, “To what extent are teachers using the new resources?” then we know we need to collect data from teachers. If our question is, “Are students’ writing skills improving?” we know we will likely need student work samples as evidence.

In each case, we will have to determine the feasibility of using different data collection strategies such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations or artifact reviews (e.g., looking at lesson plans or student work samples). Each of these strategies features a set of distinct advantages and disadvantages and requires different resources.

Next Up In the Series:

In Part 5, we dive deeper into Data Collection.

Micro-Credentials — Frequently Asked Questions

MICRO-CREDENTIALS HELP YOU FOCUS PROFESSIONAL LEARNING ON OUTCOMES

 

There’s nothing wrong with mandating a certain amount of professional learning for teachers throughout the year. But when meeting a minimum hourly requirement becomes the goal in itself, rather than the means to improving practice, the effectiveness of PD plummets.

That’s why it’s so important to focus on impact and outcomes, not punching a clock. That can be a bit of a holy grail: easy to talk about, difficult to achieve. And that’s one reason micro-credentials are growing in popularity in schools and districts.

Micro-credentials are an effective way for leaders to be sure their educators have the skills needed to be successful in the classroom. They’re also a great way for educators to be recognized for the skills they possess or develop through professional learning.

Q: What impact do micro-credentials have on professional learning?

Micro-credentials make the professional learning experience far more effective. They do this by:

  • Requiring job-embedded evidence to earn the micro-credential, so you know the educator can apply the skills they’ve learned in the classroom.
  • Allowing educators to focus on developing the skills they lack, without spending a lot of time on the skills they already have.

Some professional development systems that offer micro-credentials also enable a collaborative-based approach to assessment, which allows you to leverage the strength of experts in your district.

You may enjoy this hand-picked content:

It’s All About the Outcome: Unraveling the confusion around micro-credentials.”  

Q: How do micro-credentials meet teachers’ needs?

While the need to develop skills and demonstrate competency has not dwindled, traditional ways of delivering and measuring professional development are becoming obsolete. In fact, 71% of teachers aren’t satisfied with their current PD offerings[i] and only 40% feel that PD activities are a good use of their time.[ii]

Every teacher has unique skills and areas for growth — so why should professional learning be one-size-fits-all? And among other criteria, the Every Student Succeeds Act calls for professional learning to be sustained, intensive and classroom-focused. In other words, the need is for professional development that reaches individual teachers right where they are — and equips them to make genuine strides in their classroom practice.

Micro-credentials provide exactly that. They allow learners to progress through their PD goals as they demonstrate mastery of skills — regardless of time, pace or place of learning.

Micro-credentials allow learners to progress through their PD goals as they demonstrate mastery of skills, regardless of time, pace or place of learning.

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Q: Why should we use micro-credentials as part of our professional development strategy?

Glad you asked! Depending on the system you’re using, there are several advantages micro-credentials offer:

  • Take a growth-based approach. Micro-credentials redefine the professional learning experience, shifting the emphasis from seat time to demonstrated competence.
  • Support development around targeted needs. Allow instructional leaders to recommend micro-credentials that match an educator’s specific growth goals.
  • Provide ongoing feedback. Educators can submit pieces of required evidence — one at a time — enabling district-assigned assessors to provide incremental feedback.
  • Enhance all your PD resources. Micro-credentials have the potential to make all the PD tools and resources your educators access — from virtual PLCs to online tools to coaches and mentors — more relevant and meaningful.
Micro-credentials in Frontline Professional Growth make the professional learning experience far more effective. They clearly show what an educator needs to know to complete the micro-credential; how they can develop the skill and if they need more knowledge or training; and how they can demonstrate skill mastery and apply it in a classroom or other professional setting. Check them out.

[i]Teachers Know Best: Teachers’ View on Professional Development. (Boston Consulting Group and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, December 2014). https://s3.amazonaws.com/edtech-production/reports/Gates-PDMarketResearch-Dec5.pdf

[ii]The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development. (The New Teacher Project, August 2015). http://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP-Mirage_2015.pdf

3 Trends to Know When Recruiting New Teachers

Every time a position opens up in your district, whether from attrition or increased student enrollment, you need to find a qualified, talented candidate to fill the role. It’s easy to get into reaction mode, where you go from filling one position onto the next, but part of strategic recruitment is looking ahead and planning accordingly.

So, what trends should you be aware of in K-12 recruiting and hiring? We looked at data from Frontline Recruiting & Hiring, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center of Education Statistics to put together a comprehensive picture of what’s on the horizon.

The numbers don’t lie — there really is a teacher shortage, and it’s bound to only get worse.

The applicant pool is relatively inexperienced.

First up: an insight from the Frontline Research & Learning Institute. One-third of the national applicant pool consists of new teachers with fewer than three years of experience.

hiring trends for recruiting new teachers pie chart

Less-experienced teachers may make up the bulk of your applicant list, and it’s important to have a way to highlight those with great potential, even if they don’t have years of teaching to back it up. And once they’re hired, you’ll want to have robust mentoring and professional development programs ready to help newer teachers hone their instructional skills.

Not only are many teaching candidates relatively inexperienced, they’re also fairly mobile. This is good news when recruiting (there’s a larger pool of job-seekers) but can be a challenge when it comes to your own district’s retention rate. New graduates don’t seem to be staying in one place for long.

Most states are seeing decreased enrollment in teacher prep programs — but not all.

If applicant pools are comprised in large part by newer educators, the logical next step is to look at the pipeline of new teachers set to enter the workforce in the next several years. Nationally, there’s certainly a shortage of teachers that’s bound to get worse. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of new teachers coming out of teacher preparation programs fell by 65% from 2009 to 2015.

New teachers coming out of teacher prep programs down by 65%, according to DOE. #K12 #teachershortage

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But what’s happening on a national level isn’t always reflective of what’s going in your own state, as demonstrated by the map below, which tracks changes in the number of educators completing teacher preparation programs by state.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, 2016 Title II Reports: National Teacher Preparation Data. https://title2.ed.gov/

Six states have defied the national decrease in the number of new teachers: Massachusetts, North Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Arizona and West Virginia. Of those, only Arizona and Utah continue to see increased enrollment in teacher preparation programs, suggesting that they will continue to produce more educators. And although New Hampshire, Washington and Vermont have had fewer teachers graduating from teacher prep programs, enrollment has recently ticked upward — so hopefully, those states will see an influx of new educators within the next couple of years.

New education graduates tend to be from large public universities in the West, or smaller private colleges in the East.

Finally, there are a few geographic trends when it comes to the most prolific teacher preparation programs.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics. IPEDS: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds

There are far more programs east of the Mississippi River, with many educators coming from many smaller colleges. Meanwhile, the West tends to see a large number of new teachers from a relatively limited number of universities.

We also see a surprisingly large number of education degrees conferred by online programs headquartered in western states, such as Ashford University (California) and Western Governors (Utah). Note that these programs’ students are likely located across the country, even though their degree is recorded under the institution’s home state.

So, what does this mean for the school district administrator? If you recruit out-of-state, consider tailoring your recruitment strategy to target some of the larger universities, even if they aren’t nearby. Consider attending a job fair in the area, if you’re up for a road trip. Just make sure to bring plenty of recruitment materials that show why your town or city is a wonderful place to live.

If you’re not up for a road trip, or travel expenses aren’t in the budget, it may be worth reaching out to large universities’ career services or schools of education to ask if they’d spread the word about open positions in your district.

Looking for more insights into the new teacher pipeline? We’ve got you covered. See more trends and data here.