The Success Case Method: An Alternative Evaluation Technique to Move Beyond the Average and into the Extraordinary

Abstract Information: In-service teacher training opportunities play a pivotal role in shaping educational outcomes, yet evaluating their effectiveness remains a persistent challenge. Traditional evaluation methods often fail to capture the nuances of educator training and the diverse experiences of participants. In response, the Success Case Method (SCM) is a promising approach to evaluating in-service teacher professional development, offering a unique lens to identify both success stories and areas for improvement. SCM is characterized by focusing on identifying and examining extreme cases, participants who have notably succeeded or struggled with the uptake of a training intervention (Brinkerhoff, 2003). The method has most often been applied to evaluating corporate and/or human resource training initiatives, with limited literature outlining the utility of the method in an educational setting. To extend the SCM literature base, this case study offers an exploration of how the method was applied to the evaluation of an in-service educator training program. This paper specifically explores the application of the SCM in evaluating an in-service teacher training program supported by the US Department of Education, Office of English Language Acquisition’s National Professional Develop (OELA NPD) grant. The OELA NPD project was designed to increase in-service educators’ capabilities and pedagogical approach to best serve culturally and linguistically diverse student populations within their classroom. The ultimate goal of the OELA NPD project was to increase the number of educators who are qualified for and able to secure their English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teaching endorsement. The project provided in-service educators professional development training through three formal graduate-level courses that provided practical teaching strategies that could be directly applied within participant’s classroom. The project also provided coaching and mentoring supports from project staff to assist educators with the implementation process of the strategies. As highlighted above, the SCM is most concerned with understanding the contextual factors that contributed or inhibited participant’s application of the training strategies into everyday practice. In the context of the OELA NPD project, the SCM allowed evaluators to extend the evaluation framework beyond the traditional impact metrics most educator training programs rely upon to measure success (i.e., aggregated, classroom-level outcomes centered on student performance and test scores). This approached provided evaluators an opportunity to delve into individual narratives. By pinpointing success cases, SCM allowed evaluators to uncover the mechanism driving positive outcomes, offering valuable insights for program enhancement. The paper outlines the SCM process in detail to provide other educational evaluators a concrete framework from which the case study evaluation was built. Findings from the SCM evaluation will be showcased to demonstrate the application of the technique to an educational setting. Finally, the paper will unpack project staff’s reaction to, and integration of the data produced from this method. Throughout the paper, special attention will be given to the process evaluators took to engage project staff in the development of the SCM process (e.g., working with staff to create an “impact model” that was used to define what success and failure looked like for the project).