Performance Management and Professional Development are ongoing and correlated processes. An effective development plan goes beyond the listing of training courses completed and affiliations maintained. A development plan should link the results of training and other professional activities to improved performance. For example, classroom observation should show how the instructor has applied and implemented the training received and the resulting improvement in identified developmental areas such as successful instructional planning, interactive teaching techniques and effective classroom management.

To make the development plan more meaningful, the observed improvements in faculty performance should be assessed against the desired student outcomes. Those outcomes could be measured from student course evaluations and class student retention data after instructors have had the opportunity to apply their new knowledge and skills on a routine and consistent basis.

In short, ongoing Performance Management and Professional Development parallel hand-in-hand. Specifically, an Individual Development Plan is the foundation to enhanced, results-oriented performance yielding positive student outcomes. Faculty coaches serve the role of ensuring that there is a transfer of training to the workplace which should be observable and should result in improved performance.  As we get busy with our daily routines, it is critical to remember this as it can become easy to simply list items in a development plan such as courses completed, meetings attended, or associations joined which are simply activities vs. observable demonstrations of improved performance.