Designing High-Quality Professional Development: Transferring Learning to Practice

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This domain is the most important for successful implementation when the learner returns to their work (Joyce & Showers, 2002). These indicators involve ongoing support that will be provided to participants to guide implementation. While some presenters may be available after the training for follow-up coaching, it is most common for the presenter’s involvement to end after the training session and the local provider to spearhead ongoing implementation support.

The presenter should:

• Provide resources that clearly detail criteria for determining successful transfer to practice, such as a rubric, checklist, or guidelines with implementation benchmarks.
• Provide resources to support implementation and further study.
• Engage participants in planning how the first stage of implementation will look in their setting.

Ongoing support is necessary to transfer learning to practice; however, in many cases, presenters don’t have the capacity to provide follow-up coaching. To support fidelity of implementation, the local provider should:

• Provide ongoing, two-way communication on the implementation of the practice. This ongoing coaching should be systematic and may occur in association with classroom observations, team meetings, or ongoing collaboration efforts.

Indicator 18. Outlines criteria that illustrate a successful transfer of the critical concepts to practice.

In order to sustain implementation, the participants need a process to determine if they are implementing the practice with fidelity. This generally involves the presenter providing clear criteria that outline the critical components of a practice and provide descriptors that allow participants to self-assess their implementation. The criteria need to identify the critical components of the innovation or practice. As described by Harn et al. (2013), fidelity is a process of continuously monitoring implementation of the core elements of the program while monitoring student progress. For example, practice profiles (State Implementation and Scaling-up of Evidence-Based Practices, 2013) and the innovation configuration matrix (Hord et al., 2013) specify the parts of an innovation and provide participants with clear mechanisms to monitor their implementation.

Because the professional development presenter is considered the expert, it is important that they provide criteria for implementation and guide the participants through these criteria. Participants should not leave a professional development session without clear criteria supporting implementation of the core components of the innovation or content.

Indicator 19. Ensures that participants leave with detailed action steps to apply their learning.

The opportunity to determine action steps prior to the end of a professional development session helps the participants take the next steps toward sustained implementation. An action plan typically includes actions, due date, resources/supports, and reflection or evaluation. Action steps can be generated by each participant or cocreated with a team, identifying responsible parties for each action. The development, use, and evaluation of an action plan takes advantage of the power of reflection to support change in practice (Bleach, 2014).

Actions can be developed by participants or selected from a range of options provided by the presenter. If action steps are not incorporated into the presentation, the local provider could add the development of an action plan at the end of the session or during a follow-up coaching session or professional learning community meeting.

Indicator 20. Provides resources and technical assistance for continued learning.

One of the prominent characteristics of adult learners is a preference to control their own learning (Knowles, 1988). Presenters can provide resources to support additional learning about and implementation of the core components of the professional development’s innovation or content. Because the adult learner may prefer to access content in different formats, presenters are encouraged to provide support materials in a variety of formats (e.g., audio, video, text) that meet the needs of those who are new to a topic and for those who wish to delve more deeply into the content. Because the presenter is the expert, they should be encouraged to provide additional resources to support continued learning or implementation.

Indicator 21. Establishes ongoing, two-way communication (coaching) to improve the implementation fidelity of critical concepts.

The use of coaching as part of a professional development model is an evidence-based practice (Dunst et al., 2015; Joyce & Showers, 2002; Knight, 2009). Research on the effectiveness of professional development events suggests that participants require extended follow-up supports of sufficient duration and intensity to improve outcomes. Coaching is a sustained and embedded process that is developed within the cultural context of organizations (Dunst et al., 2015). Coaching, initiated as part of the learning design, has also been shown to increase the use of data monitoring to support implementation (Castillo et al., 2024). While the presenter may offer follow-up to questions or analysis of work, in most cases this will not constitute a coaching relationship. It is anticipated that the local provider will establish or take advantage of established coaching relationships to assist the participants in sustaining the core components of the innovation or content.