Gathering evidence on the outcomes of any professional learning experience can be a challenging and complicated task. It involves consideration of a wide variety of perceptual and contextual issues, some obvious to education leaders and others not. Those who want to succeed in this process may find the following points helpful: (1) Always begin…

Every teacher can recall a range of experiences in professional development workshops. Some of these may have provided opportunities in which teachers felt engaged, empowered, and supported as learners, while others felt disconnected from practice. Although these authors recognize that workshops, particularly those with no follow-up support, are…

Accountability is now a requirement in education, and that extends to professional development. Leaders must understand what evaluation is, what its purposes are, and the critical levels of professional development evaluation to be able to provide meaningful data that demonstrate the difference professional learning makes.

Describes a training program for principals who are mentors for other principals. After defining mentoring, the article considers fundamental assumptions about development of formal mentoring programs, then outlines a mentor training model. Evaluation indicates the program increased mentors' understanding of their mentor relationships and helped…

Three sets of relationships between evaluation and staff development are identified: (1) evaluation for staff development in which data from evaluations suggest the program content; (2) evaluation of staff development in which evaluative activities become opportunities for problem solving; and (3) evaluation of staff development in which…