California Department of Education Takes First Steps to Improve Current Teacher and Administrator Evaluation Systems
California Department of Education's Educator Excellence Task Force has cited Pivot Learning Partners work with the North Bay Collaborative - a collaborative of eleven schools working on improving teacher evaluation - as an example of what is needed as school districts work on strengthening their evaluation systems.
- San Francisco, CA (1888PressRelease) September 14, 2012 - Earlier this week, the California Department of Education's Educator Excellence Task Force, which includes Pivot Learning Partners Executive Director Merrill Vargo as a member, released a report that provides recommendations on how to strengthen California's teacher and administrative corps. The report, Greatness By Design: Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State, recommends that "improving our current systems should model the collaborative processes that are needed for effective teaching and school management". Pivot Learning's work with the North Bay Collaborative, a collaborative of eleven school districts, is cited as an example of what is needed. In contrast with the conflict-ridden approaches that often make the news, the North Bay Collaborative involved multiple stakeholders working together to strengthen teacher evaluation.
A Collaborative Approach to Redesigning Teacher and Principal Evaluation Systems
Many districts have developed a consensus-driven approach to redesigning teacher and principal evaluation systems. One strategy, supported by Pivot Learning Partners, begins with a committee made up of teacher leaders, union representatives, principals and district administrators. Ideally, districts redesign both teacher and principal evaluations concurrently. The first step in the process is for the cross-role committee to develop a shared vision of what excellent evaluation systems would look like if they were to support improvement and growth over time, compare that with best practices elsewhere, and then capture this shared vision in district-specific frameworks for teaching and leadership. In the course of this work, the California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTPs) are used as a launching pad for this discussion of what constitutes excellence. This discussion also draws on work being done in systems throughout the country.
Once created, a district's new frameworks provide a common language, clear expectations and a shared picture among teachers and administrators of both the practices and the indicators of student learning that are most valued by the committee and the teaching and leadership practices that contribute to high quality teaching and leadership. These descriptors provide the raw material for the development of a district-specific set of rubrics and descriptors of evidence for a range of critical practices associated with effective teaching and learning. They also provide the foundation for development of new evaluation tools. These rubrics reflect the CSTPs as they have been interpreted locally, so that they are owned, valued, understood and internalized by the people who created them.
This approach is time-consuming and can be challenging. To be truly effective, this tool development phase must be followed by a period of time to pilot the frameworks, rubrics and tools. But the districts that have pursued it have found that it brings several benefits. First, the process itself builds the level of trust necessary for an evaluation system to drive improvement; second, calibration of evaluators is far easier when it can build on a shared vision of excellence; and, finally, by focusing the process on defining excellence first, technical issues of measurement and conversations about accountability are undertaken as tools to achieve a goal that all value and share.
About the North Bay Collaborative and Pivot Learning Partners :
The North Bay Collaborative involved eleven small to mid-sized districts in Sonoma County. With funding from State Farm and the Full Circle Fund, and with in-kind support from Full Circle and the Sonoma County Office of Education, the Collaborative was facilitated by Pivot Learning Partners. Pivot Learning Partners is a non-profit organization that has built long-term relationships with California school districts since 1995 to create educational systems that are more equitable, more efficient, and more effective. Using a research-based theory of action, Pivot Learning supports school districts in analyzing, designing and implementing customized solutions that draw on both best and next practices to develop leaders and redesign systems that reflect a vision of the educational organizations of the future.
For more information, visit www.pivotlearningpartners.org.
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