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In this edition of ⚗️DistillED, we're exploring The Impact Ladder: a way of checking whether professional learning is actually changing what happens in classrooms.
This matters whether you're running whole-school CPD, a single INSET day, or five minutes in a department meeting. Any school leader who's ever booked training is asking the same question afterwards: did it actually work?
In this edition
📊 Do Now: Quick Poll!
When your school evaluates a training day, what do you actually look at afterwards?
What Is the Impact Ladder?
The Impact Ladder is based on Thomas Guskey's model for evaluating professional development, and it's shaped how this field thinks about the question for over two decades. It treats evaluation as a chain, not a single measurement, which I’ve visualised in five ladder rungs captured in the diagram below:
Five rungs of CPD evaluation. Too often, evaluation stops at Rung 1.
The five levels ask progressively more consequential questions. Knowing that teachers enjoyed the session tells you something useful but almost nothing about whether their learning changed, whether practice changed, or whether students benefited.
The trick is to decide what you want to see in student outcomes first, then work back through what teachers would need to be doing differently in lessons, what organisational support would make that possible, and what they'd need to understand and practise, before designing the session itself.
Take a department that wants to lift Year 9 writing grades. Working down from the top:
Rung 5 — Student Outcomes: We want to improve the quality of Year 9 extended writing by the end of the year.
Rung 4 — Classroom Practice: To achieve that, teachers need to routinely give students actionable feedback on drafts before final submission.
Rung 3 — Organisational Support: To make that possible, the department needs protected drafting and feedback time in the assessment calendar and an agreed routine for giving and responding to feedback.
Rung 2 — Teacher Learning: Teachers therefore need to understand what effective formative feedback looks like and practise giving feedback that improves the next draft, rather than simply correcting the previous one.
PD Experience: Now design the professional learning: model effective and ineffective examples of draft feedback, unpack the underlying principles, have teachers practise writing feedback on sample Year 9 work, receive feedback on their attempts, and plan how they will use the routine in an upcoming assessment.
Rung 1 — Participant Reaction: Once the PD has run, ask whether teachers found the experience relevant, useful and well designed.
👎 The Impact Ladder IS NOT:
A Happy Sheet → how enjoyable or well-run the day felt.
An Attendance Log → hours logged, courses completed, sessions "cascaded" to colleagues.
Proof of a Single Cause → real-world schools have too many intervening variables to prove a programme alone caused a result. The standard to aim for is evidence, not proof.
A Single End-of-Day Survey → one measurement point can't tell you whether anything has stuck.
👍 The Impact Ladder IS:
A Chain of Evidence → reaction, learning, organisational support, classroom use, and student outcomes, each building on the last.
Planned Backward → you decide what change in student outcomes you're after, then work back to the CPD design that could plausibly get you there.
About Classroom Practice Changing → the test is what's different in lessons, books, and results.
Checked for Durability → an addition beyond Guskey's original five levels: whether the change survives an ordinary week, not just the observed one.
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Why Does the Impact Ladder Matter?
Guskey's argument is that most PD is planned in the wrong order. Schools start with an activity (a course, a speaker, an INSET slot) and hope it eventually shows up in outcomes. He argues it has to run the other way:
“In planning professional development to improve student learning, the order of these levels must be reversed. You must plan "backward."
If we skip this backwards order, the effects compound in the wrong direction: as Guskey puts it, "the decisions made at each level profoundly affect those at the next," so a poorly specified starting point quietly undermines the rest of the sequence.
There's a separate, more practical reason evaluation stops at Rung 1: it's the easiest data to collect. As Guskey notes, end-of-session feedback is “the most common form of professional development evaluations, and the easiest type of information to gather and analyze.” It is also among the least informative about impact. Some educators, he notes, call these measures “happiness quotients”: they tell us how participants reacted to the experience, not whether they learned anything, changed their practice, or improved student outcomes. Evidence higher up the ladder is harder to collect because it requires returning to classrooms weeks or months later, once the training is old news, to see whether anything has actually changed—and whether that change has lasted.
Guskey’s work helps us identify where impact disappears. Sims and colleagues offer a useful way of diagnosing why. Their meta-analysis identifies four components that effective teacher PD programmes combine:
Insight: Teachers develop a deeper understanding of teaching and learning.
Goals: Teachers develop the motivation to pursue a specific change in practice.
Techniques: Teachers build the practical skills needed to make that change.
Practice: Teachers receive ongoing support to embed it in their classrooms.
This helps explain why PD might not change classroom practice. Teachers might understand the idea but not know how to use it, or learn the technique but lack the support to keep using it. A Rung 1 feedback form won't tell you that.
👉 Read more on why understanding the principle behind a technique is what makes it work here: Strategies vs Principles
School CPD Content
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How Do I Use the Impact Ladder?
In typical DistillED fashion, here's a practical version of a fairly academic model. You don't need five separate reports to run this. You need to ask better questions at the right points, and stop treating the easy data as if it were the important data.
Strategy | Explanation | Example |
|---|---|---|
1. Write the Backward Plan First
| Write one sentence in an if-then-so form: if teachers do X, then Y happens for students, so Z measure should move. Then decide what a learning walk, book look, or assessment result would need to show for that to count as working. Only pick the format (twilight, whole-day INSET, coaching cycle) once you know what it has to produce, not before. | "If teachers embed cold calling with wait time, more students engage with hard questions, so end-of-unit scores in Year 9 science should rise. We agreed what that would look like on a learning walk before we booked anyone to run the session." |
2. Relabel Rung 1 Data
| Keep the same end-of-session form. Change how you file the answers: put "was this well delivered" next to logistics and facilitator notes, not next to your impact evidence, so nobody mistakes a good mood for a good result when the CPD gets reviewed. | "The form still asks whether it was a good use of their time. It just doesn't get filed as impact evidence anymore." |
3. Check for the Missing Ingredient
| When a walk or book look shows no change, don't stop at "the training didn't land." Ask which of the four is actually missing: did teachers understand the idea, want to change, know how to do it, or get support to keep doing it once term got busy. Name one before deciding what to fix next. | "They understood the theory but never had a slot to rehearse the technique before using it live." |
4. Look for the Change
| Schedule two or three short drop-ins targeting the specific technique, a few weeks after the session rather than on the day itself. | "We did three ten-minute drop-ins looking for the specific technique." |
5. Check the Outcomes
| Repeat the same drop-in six to eight weeks later, so you're seeing past the novelty and the observation effect. Once your planned timeframe is up, check that against the actual outcome measure you named at the start. If practice held but the outcome didn't move, that's diagnostic too — wrong technique, or the right one aimed at the wrong problem. | "We repeated the same drop-in eight weeks later to see whether it had stuck. Once the assessment cycle closed, we checked the actual Year 9 grade distribution against the target we'd named when we wrote the plan." |
You do not need to turn school PD into a research project. You need to stop treating the easiest evidence as the most important evidence. Decide what should change before the training begins, specify what that change would look like in classrooms, and then go back later to see whether it happened and whether it lasted.
Your PD worked if all three hold: classroom practice changed, that change survived an ordinary week, and the outcome you named at the start moved. If any one of those is missing, it didn't and you'll know exactly which rung to go back to.
— Jamie
If you want more:
👉 Read Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction — a research-based framework for what effective teaching looks like, the same kind of evidence base the Impact Ladder asks you to plan CPD backward from
👉 Read Poor Proxies for Learning — the classroom version of mistaking easy signals for real impact
👉 Read Strategies vs Principles — why understanding the principle behind a technique is what makes it stick
👉 Get the Full Rosenshine CPD Pack — the research-based instructional framework this edition points to as an example of what backward-planned CPD should be built around
👉 Get the Poor Proxies for Learning CPD Collection — the classroom version of the same easy-signal problem this edition tackles at the CPD level
📥 Free Planning Tool
The PD Evaluation Tool
To help you put this into practice immediately, download the PD Evaluation Tool — a simple, school-ready template that guides you through the five rungs of the Impact Ladder in backward-planning order: naming the student outcome you're after, specifying the classroom practice that would produce it, agreeing the organisational support it needs, identifying what teachers need to learn first, and only then choosing the session itself. With space to record your answer at each rung, both before you commit to the CPD and again once it's run, it can be used individually, in a coaching conversation, or during team PD.
⚗️DistillED+ Exclusive Member’s Content
This week, ⚗️DistillED+ members get access to an Impact Ladder CPD PowerPoint and a Printable Impact Ladder Checklist — breaking down how to plan professional learning backwards, evaluate its impact beyond feedback forms, and identify whether it is actually changing classroom practice and student outcomes.
