The 360 Trainer Performance Evaluation: Holistic and Actionable Feedback for Professional Growth

• In Event: Advancing the professional development of teachers and trainers in youth programs: Tools and approaches

Proposal

One of Education Development Center’s central roles in any of its youth workforce and soft skills programs is to train facilitators in its work readiness curriculum, which facilitators ultimately teach to local youth. Project staff noticed a gap between trainers’ understanding of the curriculum and their comfort in actually facilitating lessons. This gap encouraged EDC to create an innovative, structured, and holistic approach to providing trainers with evaluative – and actionable – feedback, to support their ongoing professional development.

Rooted in pedagogical theory, the evaluation’s toolkit takes feedback from four sources – the facilitator, a professional trainer, and the facilitator’s participants and colleagues. By gathering input from four sources, EDC can comprehensively evaluate trainers’ progress and plot them on a professional development rubric on a scale from 1 to 5 – beginning to distinguished/expert. The rubric, created with experts in teacher training, covers four domains of effective instructional theory: Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Structured Instructional Approach, Knowledge of How People Learn, and Efficacy.

In addition to the evaluation process, EDC developed a structured analysis and feedback protocol for sharing results with individual trainers, and coaching trainers in developing and implementing plans for improving specific skills. During the pilot, this process yielded improvements for the majority of trainers who participated.

This session will present the 360 tool and look at it in practice across the six pilot countries – Bolivia, Peru, Senegal, Indonesia, Ghana, and Tanzania.

Author

• Cecilia Lucia La Torre Ramirez, Education Development Center (EDC)