Assessing Impact: Evaluating Professional Learning

Design high-impact professional learning programs with results-based evaluations

With increasing accountability pressure for evidence-based strategies and ever-tightening budgets, you want to make sure that the time, effort, and resources you are investing in your professional learning programs is truly making an impact on educator effectiveness and student achievement. 

In this third edition of Assessing Impact, Joellen Killion guides administrators, professional learning leaders, school improvement teams, and evaluators step by step through the rigors of producing an effective, in-depth, results-based analysis of your professional learning programs. A recognized expert in professional learning, Killion emphasizes the critical role of evaluation in bolstering effectiveness and retaining stakeholder support for ongoing educator development. The methods outlined here help you:

• Adhere to changes in federal and state policy relating to professional learning and educator development
• Facilitate the use of extensive datasets crucial for measuring feasibility, equity, sustainability, and impact of professional learning
• Produce more powerful, data-driven professional learning programs that benefit both students and educators
• Evaluate the effectiveness and impact of professional learning to make data-informed decisions and increase quality and results
  
  

Assessing Impact is a vital resource for staff developers and educational leaders seeking to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of professional learning, while retaining the support of parents and the public alike. 

Praise for the Second Edition:

"Anyone who reads this book has to feel obligated to ′set their world on fire.′ The text not only forces the reader to see how we are failing our children and their teachers, it provides the means for each of us to do better."
―Michael J. Ford, Superintendent
Phelps-Clifton Springs CSD, Clifton Springs, NY
 

 

Joellen Killion champions educator learning as the primary pathway to student success. She serves school systems, schools, regional, state, and national agencies within the U.S. and abroad as a consultant and learning facilitator. She is senior advisor to Learning Forward and formerly was its deputy executive director. Joellen leads, facilitates, and contributes to a number of initiatives related to examining the link between professional development and student learning. She has over 30 years of experience in planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of professional learning at the school, system, state, and international level.

Joellen is a frequent contributor to education publications. Her books include What Works in the Middle, What Works in the Elementary Grades, and What Works in the High School, Teachers Who Learn Kids Who Achieve: A Look at Model Professional Development; Assessing Impact: Evaluating Staff Development, 2^nd edition; Collaborative Professional Learning Teams in School and Beyond: A Tool Kit for New Jersey Educators; Taking the Lead: New Roles for Teacher and School-based Coaches; The Learning Educator: A New Era in Professional Learning; Becoming a Learning School; Coaching Matters: and Learning-Focused Feedback: Transforming Feedback for Professional Learning. She authored and co-authored numerous papers, reports and workbooks such as PDK’s EDge, The Changing Face of Professional Development and resources associated with the TPL initiative. Her particular interests are collaborative learning teams, coaching educator success, evaluation and program audits, standards for professional learning, policy to support professional learning, and comprehensive planning and implementation of high-quality, standards-based, results-focused professional learning.

The creed Joellen lives by is: Excellence can be achieved if you . . . Care more than others think is wise . . . Risk more than others think is safe . . . Dream more than others think is practical . . . Expect more than others think is possible . . .