POTENT - A Professional Development Tool

Denise Burson
Apr 11, 2011

How do you determine if your Professional Development has quality?

Are you looking for a tool to analyze the overall professional development at your school or to plan significant events within the scope of a multiyear school plan?  POTENT may be the professional development tool that you are looking for. In the second edition of, Why Can’t We Get It Right?  Designing High-Quality Professional Development for Standards-Based School, Speck and Knipe outline the acronym POTENT that includes Purpose and Preparation, Outcomes, Targets and Tools, Energy and Evaluation, Numbers (data), Names, and Needs, Timelines.

Planners can use POTENT to analyze the overall professional development, yet they can use the tools for professional development opportunities within their plans. The following are questions to evaluate and analyze your professional development:

Purpose and Preparation

  • What is the central focus of your work and how does it align with your organization’s core purpose?

  • Who cares about this work?

  • Clearly define the problem that the School-based Professional Development Program (SPLP) is designed to address.

  • How will you prepare staff with information about how change occurs and how groups of people become high performing teams?

Outcome

  • Is your outcome worthy of the cost? Explain.

  • Is it achievable? Explain.

  • Does it involve skill development and mastery? Explain.

  • What is the impact on student achievement?

  • In what ways does it promote a learning community – collaboration, working from data, respect, inquiry, dialogue, free of blame?

Target

  • Who are the target participants?

  • How will you assess their readiness?

  • How will you organize your work?

  • What tools and technology do you need? Will you do presentations, coaching, feedback, action- research, and follow-up? Explain the rationale for your choices.

Energy and Evaluation

  • What energy level or passion do you have for pursuing and sustaining the outcomes? Describe clearly why you believe in this project.

  • If you struggle to answer question #1, how might you restructure the outcomes so that they are worthy of your energy and passion?

  • What processes are in place to evaluate the impact of the SPLP work on student achievement? If none are in place, what processes will you develop to evaluate the impact of the SPLP work on student achievement?

Numbers

  • What data do you have that support the need for the professional development?

  • What data do you need to support the development and implementation of the professional development?

  • What evaluation data do you need to make decisions about the effectiveness of the professional development?

  • Who will be involved in the professional development?

  • What are their responsibilities?

  • What resources do you need – human, fiscal, material – to develop, implement, and evaluate the professional development?

Timelines

  • What results can reasonably be expected in 1 month, 1 year, 3 years?

  • What are the short range and long-range professional goals connected to the timelines?

  • What does success of the professional learning look like?