Measuring engagement in professional development - The tools

• In Event: Poster session III
  In Poster Session: Poster session 3

Proposal

In July, 2018, a week long ethnographic study was conducted to track rural Honduran teachers’ engagement levels during their first professional development training of a two year program run by the non-profit Students Helping Honduras. We chose to study engagement to track how teachers’ responses to the professional development experience changed over time and provide one measure of the impact of the training program. The Praxis Inquiry Learning Cycle states that for teachers to change their practice and implement lessons from professional development training, they must first have these practices described, explained, and theorized (Samarji & Hooley, 2015), the success of which is found in changes in engagement levels.
The study followed two cohorts of fifteen teachers across 3.5 hour trainings sessions for five consecutive days. The researcher used several observation tools including open field notes about behavior patterns, cell phone usage, participation (asking and/or answering questions); an observed engagement scale from 1-5, and tracking teacher movements each session through a seating chart. The participation and movement tracking was drawn from Hargis (2014) faculty flow-diagram approach to collecting classroom data. Findings showed noticeable differences between the two cohorts--data that will be used to inform how the program will support these teachers over the two-years to ensure efficacy and fidelity of professional development in praxis.
Both groups of teachers were found according to the engagement scale to be most engaged on the third day of training, but the morning group increased throughout the week while the afternoon group decreased. However, when teachers were surveyed at the end of the week about their self-perceived levels of engagement, average rankings were higher than those found by the researcher. Many teachers expressed that they became more comfortable and engaged throughout the week. One possible correlation is a noted increase in familiarity with the individuals conducting the training as new individuals were introduced on the fourth and fifth day when engagement decreased.
This study is an important contribution to CIES 2019 because it highlights the value of ethnographic data collection in professional development spaces. The researcher was able to put daily findings into practice by giving the training leaders data on participants’ engagement levels. This feedback was used to make immediate changes in training sessions through targeted activities to increase the impact of the professional development experience. By increasing the effectiveness of the training, the leadership maximizes opportunities for reinforcing tools and lessons that could result in a teachers’ increased likelihood to modify their classroom praxis.
Currently, there is very limited work from this region regarding teachers’ experiences and few professional development opportunities are available. As such, it is important to evaluate whether the current opportunities available are actually engaging teachers and generating change. In future research, we hope to continue to collect data on teacher engagement in professional development opportunities over their two years with the program to inform feedback cycles to those leading the training as well as to see changes in behavior over time that can inform program evaluation and impact.

Authors

• Katharine Summers, Students Helping Honduras

• Maxie Gluckman, University of California, San Diego