Benefits

The PDAL collects longitudinal data on both formal and informal PD activities and is aligned with the Survey of Enacted Curriculum (SEC). The data is accurate, time-sensitive, minimizes recall problems, and is context sensitive (e.g., to the characteristics of the activity). In addition, the PDAL alleviates teachers’ response burden and makes it possible for administrators to plan for instructional improvement in several ways:

• Align curriculum with standards and system wide assessments
• Monitor indicators of instruction and relationship to student achievement
• Analyze differences in instruction and content across schools and classes, and identify improvement strategies through school leadership teams
• Provides accurate, time-sensitive, and rich information about teachers’ professional development experiences
• Offers flexibility to use fine-grained, disaggregated time-series data to construct profiles of teachers’ learning activities at various levels (e.g., teacher-level, activity-level, or overall district-level)
• Helps create a portfolio of teachers’ professional development activities by taking a comprehensive and inclusive approach
• Helps teachers reflect on their own PD experiences by reviewing their own logs