CEOE Professional Development 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which component is MOST critical for ensuring that professional development leads to changes in classroom practice?
- High participant attendance rates
- Follow-up support and coaching after initial training (Correct answer)
- Expert presenters with national reputations
- Distributing written materials to all participants
Correct answer: Follow-up support and coaching after initial training
Research consistently shows that follow-up coaching and support are necessary for translating new knowledge into sustained instructional change.
Question 2: A team of teachers meets weekly to examine student work and adjust instruction accordingly. This practice is BEST described as:
- Collaborative planning
- Professional Learning Community (PLC) (Correct answer)
- Curriculum mapping
- Peer evaluation
Correct answer: Professional Learning Community (PLC)
A PLC is a structured team that collaboratively analyzes student learning data and adjusts instructional practices to improve outcomes.
Question 3: Oklahoma teachers are required to complete professional development hours as part of certification renewal. What is the PRIMARY purpose of this requirement?
- To satisfy federal No Child Left Behind mandates
- To ensure educators maintain and expand current, effective instructional knowledge and skills (Correct answer)
- To provide documentation for teacher salary increases
- To reduce the need for formal teacher evaluations
Correct answer: To ensure educators maintain and expand current, effective instructional knowledge and skills
Continuing professional development requirements exist to ensure educators remain current with evolving best practices and content knowledge.
Question 4: Which scenario BEST demonstrates transfer of professional development learning to classroom practice?
- A teacher writes a reflection essay about a workshop
- A teacher implements a new formative assessment strategy and collects data on its impact (Correct answer)
- A teacher shares workshop handouts with colleagues
- A teacher attends a follow-up webinar on the same topic
Correct answer: A teacher implements a new formative assessment strategy and collects data on its impact
Transfer occurs when teachers apply new strategies in their classrooms and assess the impact on student learning.
Question 5: A district wants to evaluate the effectiveness of a professional development initiative. Which evaluation level addresses whether learning actually improved student outcomes?
- Level 1 – Participant satisfaction
- Level 2 – Participant learning
- Level 3 – Application of learning
- Level 4 – Results/student outcomes (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Level 4 – Results/student outcomes
Kirkpatrick's Level 4 evaluation measures the ultimate impact of professional development on student achievement and organizational results.
Question 6: Which of the following is a characteristic of high-quality, sustained professional development according to research?
- It is delivered primarily through summer institutes disconnected from school-year practice
- It is content-focused, job-embedded, and extends over time with active learning opportunities (Correct answer)
- It emphasizes theory over practice for deep conceptual understanding
- It is delivered uniformly to all staff regardless of individual teacher needs
Correct answer: It is content-focused, job-embedded, and extends over time with active learning opportunities
Research identifies sustained, content-focused, job-embedded professional learning with active participation as the hallmark of effective PD.
Question 7: A teacher participates in a lesson study group. What is the DEFINING feature of this professional development approach?
- Teachers independently design and test new assessments
- Teachers collaboratively plan, observe, and discuss a single research lesson (Correct answer)
- Teachers study academic journals to improve content knowledge
- Teachers shadow expert educators in other districts
Correct answer: Teachers collaboratively plan, observe, and discuss a single research lesson
Lesson study involves a collaborative cycle of planning, teaching, observing, and reflecting on a single lesson to improve instruction.
CEOE Professional Development 3
Which component is MOST critical for ensuring that professional development leads to changes in classroom practice?