What should we look for when evaluating
professional development programs?
While our analysis has validated many
alternative approaches to professional development, we clearly
do not support the notion that “anything goes” in
mathematics teacher education. On the contrary, we believe that
the quality of the professional development offered
determines to a great extent whether any reform effort
succeeds.
Professional development can be
expensive, and resources allocated to it are usually limited.
Therefore, it is critically important that consumers,
decisionmakers and providers of professional development learn
to evaluate the quality of available professional development
programs.
Too often, the decisions made about
professional development – what to offer, fund or
participate in – are based simply on the topic, for
example, whether the professional development is on assessment,
cooperative learning, technology or high school geometry. In
this monograph, we have tried to alert readers to many other
aspects of professional development that should be considered
when evaluating available programs
.
To begin evaluating a program, we suggest
identifying one’s own needs, priorities and constraints
in the larger context of pursuing school mathematics reform.
This list should yield a sense of the larger goals
against which the focus and the structure of a specific professional development
initiative should be evaluated.
Analyzing the main experiences in
a professional development program will show its potential to meet
one’s goals and needs. Throughout this monograph, we
emphasize that certain types of professional development
experiences are more conducive than others in addressing
certain teacher learning needs. Nevertheless, since our
analysis in Chapters 4 through 8 shows how widely these
approaches can vary, simply knowing that a program uses case
discussions or analyses of student work may not be enough
information to evaluate its appropriateness for furthering
one’s goals.
How can different constituencies contribute
to more effective professional development?
We believe that providing quality
professional development is the joint responsibility of the
teacher educators who design it, the school administrators who
decide what to offer or require for teachers, and the teachers
who choose what programs in which to participate. Therefore, we
conclude this monograph with suggestions for how each of these
groups can promote quality professional development aimed at
school mathematics reform.
First, we believe that professional
development providers can design more effective professional
development initiatives by doing the following:
• Developing
a rich repertoire of effective professional development
experiences and learning to use them appropriately.
• Identifying
the specific reform goals, needs and constraints of their
audience.
•
Selecting and sequencing appropriate professional development
experiences to address the goals, needs and constraints of
their audience.
• Capitalizing
on relevant exemplary materials for teacher educators instead
of “reinventing the wheel.”
Second, school and district administrators who
decide which programs to offer teachers can contribute to
quality professional development by doing the following:
• Identifying
the main needs for professional development within the larger
goal of pursuing school mathematics reform in their school or
district and the constraints on providing professional
development in their particular context.
• Knowing
what different kinds of professional development experiences
can be expected to achieve and what resources are needed to
implement them appropriately.
•
Maximizing the limited resources available for professional
development by using them to fund programs that are most likely
to effectively support school mathematics reform and to
meet the school/district priorities.
• Ensuring
that each professional development experience is offered only
by providers with the required expertise and qualifications.
• Providing
adequate resources for a quality implementation of the
professional development program selected.
Last, but not least, professional
development participants should become critical consumers by doing
the following:
• Identifying
their personal and professional goals and needs within the
reform agenda of their school or district.
• Developing
reasonable expectations about what professional development can
and should achieve and about the time and effort required to
benefit from it.
• Learning
to evaluate the quality of a professional development
initiative and to determine whether it can meet one’s
needs.
If we all do our part in these ways, we
can expect to see an increase in high quality professional
development opportunities for all mathematics educators.
