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ew knowledge and skills. It is essential to evaluate where the participants’ are actually putting into practice the new knowledge they gained in professional development. The fifth level considers the student outcomes as a part of the evaluation of the programmes. It is one of the most important elements of evaluation because it assesses the impact on student learning. The principal, as an instructional leader, should be able to convince the teachers of the real benefit of professional development in achieving the targets through evidence. As King (2002) observes, ‘instructional leadership is anything leaders do to improve teaching and learning by gathering evidence of student achievement that demonstrates improvement’ (p. 61).Most often, our evaluation of teacher practices become more summative rather than formative. In fact, formative evaluation helps teachers to grow professionally and studies Show formative evaluations are more suitable since they motivate teachers to implement the new methods of teaching they have learned in the professional development programmes. A good formative evaluation should be making teachers aware of the evaluation criteria ahead of time, providing feedback afterward, giving them the opportunity to discuss their evaluation and offering them support to target the areas in which they need improvement (Little, Goe and Bell, 2009).

Getting the right professional development to close the achievement gap

In this part of the literature review, I would like to discuss the effective strategies for professional development of teachers to close the achievement gap in light of the published literature. I believe any professional development programme, to be effective, should consider various aspects such as personal, social and occupational. Bell and Gilbert (1996) identify the personal and social aspects of professional development. The personal aspect includes teachers’ beliefs, values and attitudes which are important considerations when building up a suitable professional development programme. Similarly, the social aspect that supports teachers’ learning is that the school community, in a collaborative manner, should support teachers in learning. Not a sentencePowerful and socially mediated learning (Falk and Dierking, 2000) with other people perceived to be knowledgeable, for example, facilitators or more experienced colleagues. The development of the occupational aspect of teacher learning shown by Clerke and Hollingsworth (2002) points out that there should be a link between theory and practice. The ‘professional experimentation’ - making sense of practical experiences, particularly those positive outcomes can lead to conceptual change and acceptance of theory. And also the professional development activities should be intellectually stimulating and professionally relevant. In other words it should be transformative professional learning (Sprinthall et al, 1996).

As a part of developing effective professional development strategies, I believe there should be proper planning beforehand. In this regard, the model developed by O’Sullivan (2002) – INSET (In-Service Education and Training) Strategies Model - is of great use. It has six stages. They are needs assessment, organization, determination of content, training process, follow up and evaluation. In my search for other models, I came across a number of modelssuch as?. Almost all agree