ARTICLE Focus Groups: Your Secret Weapon for Enhancing Professional Development Program Evaluation Focus groups (FGs) -- essentially interactive, conversational group interviews -- are an underappreciated data collection strategy. When used well, they can provide rich, nuanced and actionable data for your professional development program evaluation.
ARTICLE Students Evaluating Teachers: It’s Time to Ask the Kids…and Then Listen to Them One day Alan*, a high school student in my special education English class, exclaimed in frustration, “All we ever do in here is read and write!” It was a proud moment for me. A huge compliment. That statement validated for me that I was doing it
ARTICLE How to Create Effective Reports for Communicating Professional Development Program Evaluation Results Wouldn’t it be great if we knew when our professional learning programs were successful? What if we knew more than just the fact that teachers liked the presenter, were comfortable in the room or learned something new?
ARTICLE 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
ARTICLE 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
