Susan Loucks is an educational researcher and theororist whose particular interest lies in professional development.

Loucks’ research focus is on understanding the change process in organizational settings. Loucks worked with Gene Hall and his team in researching and developing how an individual approaches change. This research led to the development, with Gene Hall, of the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM). (Everett Rogers studied change in groups).

The CBAM addresses the stages of concern:

• Awareness
  
• Informational
  
• Personal
  
• Management
  
• Consequence
  
• Collaboration
  
• Refocusing
  

According to Hall, Loucks, et al. these stages are common for all individuals, and each person goes through each of these stages when they face a new innovation. CBAM is a conceptual framework that describes, explains and predicts teacher behaviors (staff development reform) during the change process, and how to properly analyze new methods of innovation. In CBAM we must study not only the change but even a newer, secondary change that results, and this secondary change must be supported for the original model to function.

Loucks believes that too often new school programs fail not in that do not achieve (good) results, but there is no corresponding manner in which to track the "new" progress of the students in that (experimental) class setting. A new order or manner of educational measurement must be used to determine whether a method is or is not successful (see Kuhn). As knowledge changes, so must teaching. She believes that good professional development mirrors good teaching; learning by doing, learning through inquiry, learning through collaboration, learning over time, and developing personal meaning. Those are the ways to help teachers learn and the ways that we need to help ourselves learn. She also believes that reform is all about learning&emdash;all people learning, not some people learning.

Loucks is concerned with this measurement in the use of the innovative process. Her basic testing is through the use of interviews rather than more stringent paper-pencil tests. PCK, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, is a link between (content) knowledge and the correct delivery time for each student involved in the learning situation, again concepts that Thomas S. Kuhn has studied.

Loucks is a member of the National Research Council's Center for Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education.