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Located on the southern edge of the greater Minneapolis area, Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools is home to nearly 9,000 students. With its commitment to environmental education and STEM, district and community leaders want to ensure that students have high-quality instruction to reach their potential as contributing and productive members of the ever-changing global community.

Collecting data for an evaluation of professional learning, the fourth step in an eight-step process, can be a relatively simple process of survey administration. Yet, as Greece Central School District leaders discovered, a survey does not capture the authentic voice of participants.

Jenks Public Schools leaders understand the significance of planning and implementation evaluation. Once a plan is in place and initial professional learning occurs, the leaders at Jenks continue to work to understand how that professional learning has impacted teachers — and students.

How do we know if professional learning is paying off? This is a question policy makers and education leaders are asking frequently, especially when engaging in planning for the upcoming year’s calendar or writing or updating school and district improvement plans.

In our 3-part blog series, the Institute is breaking down the latest research report on Growth Metrics for K-12 Human Capital Management. In Part 1, we broke down the key performance indicators for measuring recruiting and hiring.

Today’s school and district leaders are managing school districts in which the needs of an increasingly diverse student population are constantly evolving—and the supply of educators is dwindling. Put simply, these leaders need to serve more student needs with fewer of the key talent resources that make high-quality education possible.

We’re all familiar with surveys. We use them whenever we seek information from groups of people, and they are our go-to data collection strategy for evaluating professional development. We may call them questionnaires or feedback forms, but the purpose remains the same - for leaders to gain insight into how educators are experiencing and learning from professional development, changing teaching practices in the classroom and impacting student learning.

How well are school systems in America measuring up to ESSA’s definition of professional development? Is professional learning “data-driven” and “classroom-focused”? That question is at the heart of Bridging the Gap, a series of reports from the Frontline Research & Learning Institute. Bridging the Gap looks at anonymized data from the professional development experiences of educators across the country and asks, “How close are we to this ideal?”  

A few weeks ago, my colleagues and I met with professional learning leaders from six innovative school districts from across the U.S. The districts are large and small, urban, suburban and rural — and each is at a different place along their own continuum to enhance professional learning and related outcomes.