In this dialogue between members of the team, we consider how to define three important concepts and terms in the project: continuing professional development, implementation and mechanisms.
How do we define continuing professional development (CPD)?
Mike:
CPD can be seen as the activities and processes that are designed to aim to lead to teacher professional learning.
So this can include formal training programmes, mentoring and coaching, reading groups, and self-study. It may be face to face, remote, or online. It might be individual or involve groups. It can have multiple aims, typically, but not always, aimed at affecting teachers’ practices to lead to pupils’ learning.
CPD aims then to lead to professional learning; CPD is not the learning itself.
Emily:
In projects like these it’s important that we have a definition which puts some boundaries around what is — and isn’t — professional development. The way you’ve described it, Mike, feels workable for that purpose.
I had a question though: I notice how you’re hedging slightly around the potential outcomes of the professional development — CPD ‘can be seen as’, and it’s ‘designed to aim to lead to…’ — and I wondered if this was deliberate.
Mike:
I didn’t really mean to hedge. When I said CPD ‘can be seen as’ I meant ‘one way of defining CPD that could fit this project is’.
When I said ‘designed to aim to lead to professional learning’ I meant this precisely — CPD is designed; this design has an aim; and that aim is to lead to professional learning.
Dee:
I think the issue of whether CPD includes both the activities or processes and the outcomes is an important one for our project to consider. I think Mike’s reflection that CPD is designed is helpful in this discussion.
How do we define ‘implementation’ of CPD?
Emily:
We’re looking at the implementation of professional development: what can be done in schools and multi-academy trusts and at policy level to support CPD being embedded in the system so that it becomes a reliable part of teachers’ professional lives throughout their careers. That could include policies or practices which ‘wrap around’ the CPD, which support participation in CPD, or which enable the implementation of change which follows as a result of CPD.
But not all CPD is ‘good’ (or, perhaps, not all implementation of CPD is good), so it might also include policies or practices which support the implementation of ‘better’ CPD in the first place, such as alignment of individual and school development needs.
Mike:
What is a good or bad outcome we might expect to see, in relation to implementation of CPD?
Here are some things to consider. Are only some staff able to access CPD? Are the ways in which they can access CPD limited to particular forms or focuses (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Access to poor CPD isn’t positive and could be negative). Are they restricted in the kinds of ways they can implement learning? What else?
Bernie:
I’m interested in that phrase ‘outcomes we might expect to see’ — indicating there may be outcomes or impacts that are observable. Do we mean change observable by others (staff/colleagues in the school, pupils, researchers)? Or, at the individual level, could this be change at a personal level (increased confidence, self-efficacy, enjoyment, fulfilment, job satisfaction etc.), which may not be observable to others unless the CPD participant is asked?
Does this difference matter? From a theory of change perspective, these individual changes may be preconditions or the short-term outcomes for other externally observable changes in practice — or medium and longer term outcomes.
Stuart:
Actually ‘seeing’ outcomes will be difficult unless we’re told about them or we witness a particular change in practice based on recent involvement in a CPD intervention. I’ll be interested in how those who implement change describe that change and qualify it in terms of practice or whole school outcomes.
Emily:
And what we’re interested in is what can be done at school and policy level to support the implementation of sustained (high-quality) CPD for all teachers.
It’s too simplistic to say we’re not interested in the CPD itself, because of course we are, but we don’t need to make a judgement about whether that CPD was ‘good’, or led to positive outcomes — we can trust participants to do that for us.
Instead, we need to understand how it was implemented which led to it being sustained over time and the intended changes being embedded in school practices. And from this we can identify mechanisms which led to or supported that implementation.
Stuart:
Yes, I agree. Surely it’s the participants’ judgement on whether it’s good or bad. As you say, we are interested in how it becomes sustained. If it is sustained then the school has made a judgement that it’s ‘good’.
How do we define CPD ‘mechanisms’?
Mike:
Mechanisms are defined in numerous ways, but simply put they can be thought of as ‘processes that result in changes in the minds, the thinking and behaviours of individuals or groups of individuals’ as well as ‘social mechanisms that link to relations between individuals and groups of individuals’ (Coldwell and Maxwell, 2018).
Mechanisms are dynamic: a mechanism involves change. This is a useful move forward, I think, from just considering, for example, school conditions — we need to understand how these conditions work to create change (and how these conditions can be created).
Emily:
And how those mechanisms interact. We might argue for a funded entitlement to teacher professional development, but that would still be experienced in different ways by different teachers in different schools.
I’m really looking forward to our case studies, where we will be able to trace the paths of these mechanisms through teachers’ real experiences of professional development.
Bernie:
I’m seeing the different three-dimensional cogs connecting and turning in different ways, at different levels, in different schools. Some of them may be generic across contexts, others may be context-specific. Some cogs may be missing, or too ineffective, which means the mechanism for onward change and movement may be lost.
I’m also looking forward to exploring the realities and intricacies of this in the case studies.
References
Coldwell, M. and Maxwell, B. (2018), Using evidence-informed logic models to bridge methods in educational evaluation. Rev Educ, 6: 267-300. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3151.