Home | Back to the Hayes Mizell Reader Index

[Remarks of M. Hayes Mizell at the first meeting of the national advisory board for the National Staff Development Council's project, "Evaluating Staff Development: Demonstrating the Impact." The meeting was held on November 19, 1999 at the Sheraton Gateway Suites Hotel O'Hare in Chicago. The goal of the two-year NSDC project is to "provide educators with practical, field-tested evaluation tools that will help them improve their data-driven decision making regarding staff development, and document for a variety of audiences the impact of staff development." Mizell is Director of the Program for Student Achievement at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.]

Evaluating Staff Development: The Kickoff


. . . My role is like that of the kickoff specialist at a football game. I get things started, but unless I bungle the kick, the success of the team doesn't really depend on how well I perform. However, the kickoff can set the tone of the game, particularly if an opposing player runs the ball back for a touchdown. This morning I will try to kick the ball away from those who think it is impossible to evaluate the effects of staff development, or those who believe staff development should not be evaluated at all. However, in the end, the success or failure of this project depends on you.

I want to say at the outset that I do not regard this endeavor as just another project. It is not just one more nice idea or potentially just another feather in NSDC's cap. This project is vitally important to the field of staff development and, more broadly, to the movement for education reform.

Some of you may consider that an overstatement, but consider the facts. First, there is consensus among the public that schools need to improve. Second, there is substantial evidence that all students need to learn at higher levels, and significantly deepen their knowledge and comprehension. Third, there is also ample evidence that too many teachers lack a thorough understanding of the subjects they teach, and/or they lack the skills necessary to engage diverse students in learning how to perform at standard in these subjects.

Fourth, pre-service education is reforming too slowly and too ineffectively, with the result that while many more new teachers should be entering the profession superbly prepared to help all students develop the knowledge and skills necessary to perform at standard, this is still the exception rather than the rule. Fifth, in some states and in some school systems, there are too many teachers who are teaching out of field or who are teaching under emergency credentials.

This is all to say that teaching, not to mention school-level instructional leadership, needs to be much better than it is. How will it get better? No, I believe that experience and common sense tells us that the only ways teachers and administrators will significantly improve their performance is through the process we call "staff development."

There are, of course, a lot of problems with staff development. It is a broad brush that covers many sins as well as applies a fresh coat of shining possibilities. The field of staff development is too tolerant of practices and activities that are superficial, wasteful, ineffective, disingenuous, perhaps fraudulent, and even harmful, but continue unchallenged day after day, year after year. There are too few advocates for powerful staff development and too few vocal opponents of practices and activities that merely masquerade under the label "staff development."

Perhaps so many people think that anything is fair game because the field has not emphasized the need to evaluate the effects of staff development. In this era of accountability and emphasis on results, it is remarkable that staff development is so unaccountable and so few people seem to care about its results. There is a widespread assumption among practitioners that beyond assessing how participants in staff development feel about their experiences, it is not possible to assess other results. This project is about disproving and countering this assumption.

Now you may think the project is merely about developing some tools and resources educators can use to evaluate the effects of staff development on educators' attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, knowledge and skills, and ultimately the learning of their students. In and of itself this is a daunting task; it is why no professional organization has seriously tackled it before now. But I hope we all understand that at least implicitly this project is about much more than creating tools and resources to evaluate staff development.

Evaluation Begins with Some Consensus
about What Staff Development Should Be

At the heart of the project is reaching consensus about what staff development should be. It is not possible to evaluate that which one cannot define or describe. Implicit in evaluation is a set of standards about what constitutes good practice. Evaluation that merely asks, "What happened?," unrelated to what one intended to happen or what should have happened, is not worth much. To be really useful, this project will have to grapple not only with the processes of evaluating staff development, but how to incorporate into these processes judgments that reflect what quality staff development should be.

Indeed, I hope utility will be the guiding principle of this project. This is not an academic exercise. It will only be successful if it produces tools and resources that practitioners in central offices and schools can use and will want to use. We do not need more resources that sit on shelves because they do not meet the real needs of practitioners, or that are too complex for all but the most expert or motivated to use, or that are based on exaggerated assumptions about the time available to use the resources, or other critical contextual factors.

On the other hand, to say that these resources should be useful is not to say that they should be so easy to use that they have no value. We have all seen resources that have emphasized convenience over substance. The challenge of this project is to keep focused on the vision of developing sound evaluation tools while also keeping in mind the practitioners who should use the tools, and the contextual realities within which they will use them.

I also want to emphasize the importance of this project to the field of staff development. In fact, perhaps it is not even accurate to refer to staff development as a field. After all, can it really be a field if its practitioners pay so little attention to its results, and if there are no means to rigorously assess its effects? I think not. This project, then, can make an important contribution to staff development becoming a true field of professional activity. In that sense, it has the potential to become a landmark project and this is why it is worthy of NSDC's best effort, and yours.

Finally, I ask you to keep in mind that this project is important to the teachers and administrators who want to improve their practice and are dependent on high quality staff development to do so. There is great potential for the tools and resources produced by this project to elevate the quality of staff development available to practitioners. If these resources cause staff developers to think harder, plan more carefully, and focus more intentionally on results, then the real beneficiaries will be teachers, administrators, and students.

I thank you for not only sharing your experience and expertise to shape and guide this project, but, more importantly, for casting your lot on a personal and emotional level with this important venture.

(For additional information about this project contact: Joellen Killion, National Staff Development Council, 10931 West 71st Place, Arvarda, CO 80004-1337. Phone: 303-432-0958. Fax: 303-432-0959. E-mail: NSDCKillion@aol.com)