Reflect

Celebrate small and significant accomplishments you experience with participants throughout the professional learning experience. Notice and acknowledge the progress individuals and the whole group made. Pausing to share the moment builds a sense of connectedness across the group, increases motivation, and indicates progress toward your goals. Make sure celebrations are meaningful and not trivial, as that can break participants’ trust and respect. A few ways to celebrate and acknowledge moments include:

• Shoutouts for participant successes
• Social media posts
• Blog posts

Gather input from participants on how they would like to celebrate and implement their ideas.

If you will conduct a formal evaluation, clearly define your evaluation questions, consider the best evaluation methods, and develop an anticipated timeline. Explicitly identify how you will use the data and feedback you receive. Determine the key parties you are required to share your findings with.

Here are some methods to evaluate your professional learning experience:

• Focus groups
• Interviews
• Pre-, mid-, and post-surveys
• Evaluation rubrics

Check out Empowering Community Perspectives in Evaluation Research for exploring strategies to implement equitable evaluation practices.

If you are not conducting a formal evaluation, you can still implement the methods shared above that you find most appropriate. Reflect on your professional learning experience to ensure you have met the goals and objectives, and determine whether your activities move you toward realizing your vision. An After Action Review is a process and tool to codify learnings in a useful way. Additionally, consider these reflective questions:

• Did I meet the goals and objectives of the professional learning experience, why or why not, and what might my next steps be?
• How might what I learned during this experience inform my professional practice?
• Which learnings do I need to take into the future when designing future professional learning experiences?
• Which learnings might impact others in my organization, and how will I share my learnings?

Close the loop on the feedback participants share, when appropriate, and your professional learning experience evaluations. Strongly consider sharing applicable learnings with participants along with how it will inform you, your organization’s work moving forward, and potentially the broader field.