Measuring the impact of CPD in Further Education

Measuring the impact of CPD in Further Education

This is the question that seems to be on everyone’s lips at the moment and was the focus at an AOC event that we attended last term. Sadly, it became clear that there was no definitive answer or a magic potion for leadership teams. Traditional face-to-face courses are under the microscope as more and more evidence is revealed that they have lead to little improvement in student attainment. The irony seems to be that the cost of these types of activity can be easily measured; number of hours or number of courses etc. however, the benefits are far more elusive.

We are currently exploring effective models of implementation in the FE sector as the sheer number of staff and the need to ensure quality with ever decreasing budgets tends to force institutions to focus more and more on measuring performance. With this in mind it’s reassuring that some are also eager to explore the more difficult path, where the focus is on reflective practice and collaborative development or ‘Professional Capital’ as described by Andy Hargreaves & Michael Fullan in their latest book Transforming Teaching in Every School 2012.

The irony is that more informal collaborations are even more difficult to measure in terms of cost let alone the outcomes. We therefore, need a pragmatic approach to target setting and reporting that is completely focused on the individual without the traditional administrative burdens associated with this level of detail. Professional Capital is a fantastic book for describing the issues and opportunities facing education, however, we are still left wondering how we might implement such a nuanced theory in our college. With this in mind I went out to the corporate world to explore some current ideas around effective target setting and change leadership and stumbled upon the Covey Foundation’s work on “The 4 Disciplines of Execution”.

Achievable Goal Setting

Quite frankly, I was blown away by the clarity of thought and the simple, actionable advice. They accurately describe the difficulty of setting achievable goals when staff are overwhelmed by what they call the ‘whirlwind’ of everyday life. They turn the focus away from outcomes to the actions that will cause actual improvement. The challenge for us in colleges is to define what these ‘lead’ measures are. For example, rather than focusing on student attendance and retention lets focus instead on what teacher behaviors we believe will have most impact on student engagement. If I believe that more challenging questioning may be an important factor then I go away and try to measure it, change it and see if affects the outcomes and so on. One discipline according to Chris McChesney from the Covey Foundation is to define a small number of goals as individuals and as teams and as institutions, and then to have a clear method of showing progress in a simple shared scoreboard. This rapid evaluative cycle develops far more of a research approach to teaching and the lessons can be shared more effectively.

This kind of focus on a few key targets comes up again and again in the profiles of successful organisations, however, we see that our lessons tend to be judged as whole ‘symphonies’, every facet dissected and placed under the microscope. This may allow my head of department to rate my performance but makes it more difficult for me to focus on the behaviors that I may need to change in order to improve. We see this time and time again as our colleges create their formal observation form in IRIS Connect and then realize that the real power of the tool is to fragment it to a number of forms, which focus on specific aspects of learning. These can then become the driver of consistency across the institution.