Mid-State Teacher Center

Professional Development Evaluation

The Effective Teacher Video Series

The Effective Teacher program that the Mid-State Teacher Center implemented for the first time this year consist of 8 video tapes, a book The First Days of School, and a Facilitator’s Handbook. The Effective Teacher shows what effective teachers do to incite student achievement. It showcases the commonsense, research-based, noncontroversial, successful techniques used by effective teachers. The SETRC coordinator and myself facilitated these workshop sessions. The first one was held in August and the remaining sessions held once per month through February.

We began this program with the goal of providing an induction for newly hired teachers in our component districts. Invitations went out to our superintendents to share this workshop flyer with their new teachers. Sixteen new teachers came to the August session. At this session we listed concerns about the first days of school and went over the objectives/outcomes of the series. We showed the first two videos and gave each participant the book The First Days of School: How to Be An Effective Teacher. The video series is correlated to the book and both contain ideas and techniques that are tried and true, fundamental, basic things that good teachers know and practice to get results in the classroom. See the enclosed Scope and Sequence of The Effective Teacher for video part and book unit correlations.

The remaining six videos were presented one per month and now all teachers in our districts were invited to attend. Some of the new teachers from the August session came back and attended each session and we now had a group of veteran teachers attending also. The split was about 50/50. The format for each session usually consisted of introducing and modeling a strategy that participants could take back and use immediately in their own classroom, viewing of the video, and group discussion related to the topics covered in the video.

Some key evaluation questions focused on changes in teacher effectiveness and student learning that we are interested in are:

·     What changes in teacher practice have occurred as a result of attending this workshop series?

·     How have these changes impacted the learning of your students?

·     Using your new skills and knowledge, what will you do differently at the beginning of the school year to ensure more learning time for your students?

The evaluation data we have gathered so far has been from the use of a generic workshop feedback form which was completed by participants at the August session and then again at the last session. We also asked participants, at the last session, to give us their feedback about the format and scheduling of the sessions. We charted their responses as pluses and wishes for next year.

Our next step will be to develop specific questions related to this program to address the key evaluation questions outlined above. We will then call participants to gather data from these specific questions. (See enclosed Interview Questions for Phone Follow-up) This will be done during the month of May. It is important that we convey the importance of evaluation as a tool to promote participant self-reflection and as a means to improve offering for teachers next year. Some teachers may not have implemented anything yet so we don’t want to make them feel uneasy about that. If that is the case we can encourage them to begin by implementing one thing at the beginning of school and to record any changes in student behavior or available learning time.

We are planning to offer this series again next year beginning in August for new teachers. Veteran teachers who attended this year’s series missed out on the August session and wished they had known about it. Therefore, this year we are considering offering a separate first session for veteran teachers in early September or advertising before the end of the school year for the August session.

Some ideas we have for improving evaluation of this program for next year are:

• At the first session go over with participants expectations for their participation in the whole series

• Gather data on participants (grade level/subject, new to teaching or new to district, veteran teacher – how many years)

• Suggest participants team up with a colleague who is also attending to observe each other in the classroom implementing a strategy

• Provide a journal (with prompts) for each participant for reflection as they try some of the strategies presented throughout the year

• Keep notes of our discussions at each session

• Continue with generic workshop feedback form after first and last session

• Follow up with phone interviews 2 months after the last session

We will present the findings of our evaluations in written format to the Mid-State Teacher Center Policy Board and Learning Innovations. We will also use comments from participants this year on flyers to advertise the workshop series to new and veteran teachers.