Building Success: Thomas Guskey on Evaluating Professional Learning and Empowering Educators

Episode Notes:

-Thomas has had a wealth of experience teaching middle school and high school. Then he went to graduate school at the University of Chicago. He worked with Benjamin Bloom. He has had the amazing opportunity to learn from such remarkable minds as this. 

-We have to give credit to those brilliant people who came before us. Tom worked with Chicago Public School as a Curriculum Evaluator and the Director of Research and Development. Then he moved into a university position at the University of Kentucky.

-He realized he had not taught at the elementary level, so he took a leave from the university and went to go live that experience in her second grade classroom. It has had a profound influence on his work ever since. 

-2024 Learning Forward Conference - Evaluating Professional Learning Experiences. 

-Donald Kirkpatrick - Evaluating Programs in Business and Industry - 4 Levels of Learning Evaluation for Professional Learning in Business Industry

1. Participants reaction
2. Participants learning
3. How it impacted practice
4. How did it improve productivity?

-Built off this model with a fifth level- All levels are important, but yet, all are different.

-Organizational support and change - what is necessary to gain a high level of implementation?

-Active ongoing sustained support from building leaders.

-When you plan instructional learning, you have to start at level 5 - look at the evidence we have on student learning and find what improvements we want to make there. 

-Begin with the end in mind - Covey

-If you plan well, evaluation takes care of itself.

-We need to recognize that there has never been significant improvement in education on any measure, in any level, in the absence of significant professional learning experiences offered to the educators you have involved. Not all professional learning is effective. But there has never been improvement with the absence of it. 

-Need Surveys - Needs versus symptoms - analyze the situation well to address the true needs as opposed to symptoms.

-If you manage learning well, you do not have to worry about managing your learners. 

-What evidence do educators most want to gauge their effectiveness as educators?

-Teacher Observation: Please don't watch me, watch my kids. 

-Common Formative Assessment 

-Bottom line - if my students didn't get it, it did not work, no matter how the educator ‘felt’ the lesson went.

-Whether or not it works is not defined by what we do, it is defined by what our students are able to do.  What can I do differently? What else can I try?

-Teachers are the most dedicated professionals that I know, across all professions. They are dedicated to making a positive influence on their students. 

-Ralph Tyler - Before you can teach anyone anything there are two fundamental decisions to make. What do you want them to know and be able to do? And you must decide what evidence you accept to verify they learned it. 

-Success is tied more to motivation than anything else.

-Students persist at activities in which they can find success. (Think kids with video games).

-It has everything to do with success.  Every time they play that video game. They have a chance to improve their score. They had another opportunity for success. They can be successful by following this process. If you show kids they can be successful, they will be. You have to build it in, really early. Build that success into everything we do! We all want success.

-How fast can you see results from a  new approach, curriculum, or program? -Two weeks! If we do not see results in two weeks then teachers will be reluctant to continue and likely go back to what they know as tried or true from be