Level models of continuing professional development evaluation: a grounded review and critique

Abstract

Continuing professional development (CPD) evaluation in education has been heavily influenced by ‘level models’, deriving from the work of Kirkpatrick and Guskey in particular, which attempt to trace the processes through which CPD interventions achieve outcomes. This paper considers the strengths and limitations of such models, and in particular the degree to which they are able to do justice to the complexity of CPD and its effects. After placing level models within the broader context of debates about CPD evaluation, the paper reports our experience of developing such models heuristically for our own evaluation practice. It then draws on positivist, realist and constructivist traditions to consider some more fundamental ontological and epistemological questions to which they give rise. The paper concludes that level models can be used in a number of ways and with differing emphases, and that choices made about their use will need to reflect both theoretical choices and practical considerations.

Keywords:

• professional development
• evaluation
• level models
• evaluation theory

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John Coldron, Bronwen Maxwell and anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. The Training and Development Agency for Schools is an agency of the UK Government responsible for the training and development of the school workforce in England, administering funding, developing policy and monitoring initial teacher education and CPD of teachers and other school staff.

2. England's NCSL – now renamed the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children's Services – is one of the largest national leadership development enterprises in the world. Largely funded by government and with a total budget about £121 million in 2008/09, it runs or commissions a very wide range of leadership development programmes targeted at leaders at all career stages and now covering all children's services, not just schools. The titles of the programmes referred to in the text are largely self‐explanatory – except for Leadership Pathways, which is a programme targeted at middle and senior leaders not yet eligible for the National Professional Qualification for Headship. For further details see http://www.nationalcollege.org.uk.