The Tool Kit for Quality Professional Development in Arkansas identifies six components of quality professional development that should be taken into consideration when building a plan for professional development (Garet et al, 2001).

These six components are:

• The sustained, long-term collaboration of educators
• A clear goal of improving student achievement
• A focus on content knowledge, instructional strategies, and student thinking
• The use of active learning such as reciprocal observations with colleagues, planning for classroom implementation and examining student work
• A whole school or grade-level focus
• The use of less traditional forms of professional development such as networks and study groups

When you are building a plan, the process you use to craft the plan is in many respects just as important as the final plan that emerges from the process. By undertaking a robust planning process that takes into account the resources and context of a district or school, learning needs of students and educators, and the performance outcomes that will be attained by all members of a learning community, the ultimate professional development plan will be more relevant to educators and more likely to increase performance.

The following questions will help to build a professional development plan that takes these six components into account. These questions should be considered by individual educators when creating their own professional development plans, as well as by groups of administrators, teachers, and staff when crafting school or district level plans.

Analyze Student Learning Needs:

• Which areas of student performance are meeting expectations and which are not?
• What assessment data are available and what patterns emerge from that data?
• What are other data telling us about student performance?

Analyze School/District Context:

• What do educators already know and what do they need to know next?
• What practices are currently in use in the classroom and how do they differ from desired practices?
• What support do educators need to implement and sustain new strategies?

Develop Improvement Goals

• What results do we want to see from students?
• What new practices do we expect from staff?
• How will we measure progress toward our improvement goal?

Identify Educator Learning Needs

• What do educators need to learn, and how does that differ from what they may want to learn?
• What patterns emerge from classroom walkthroughs and what do they reveal about educator performance?
• What actions can be undertaken to address these learning needs?

Once you have answered these questions, review your responses and see if the plan or offering that you are considering adequately addresses the goals that you identified.

For more tools and resources to assist in planning and assessing professional development, see Chapter 2 of A Tool Kit for Quality Professional Development in Arkansas.