Teacher and Administrator Evaluations: 2013-2014

Hello again, Ansonia.

As you are now well aware, the SDE Commissioner's reform legislation includes many changes in state laws that pertain to our profession.  One area of particular note is teacher and administrator evaluation.  While the law and guidelines around this can be quite confusing, we have good teams of representatives from our unions and central office working on this right now.

Firstly, I'd like to thank the representatives from the two affected unions who have dedicated their after-school time to helping us get ready for this shift.  Tonight will be our second meeting of many on this challenging project.  In the end, our goal is to decide upon (or design) a system that is fair, provides meaningful feedback, and complies with the new state law.

Here is a quick review of the structure of this initiative at the state level.

The state law defines the basic elements of all plans.
Then...

The "Guidelines" from the SDE provide more 

specifics about implementation

Then...

The SDE document known as SEED provides a 

recommended way of implementing the Guidelines.

The law and guidelines lay out four areas of the evaluation and the percentage that each area contributes to the professional's summative evaluation.  These are:

• Student outcomes - 45% - We have chosen to use the SEED model for this portion.
• Teacher performance - 40% - We will propose to use the Kim Marshall model for this portion (currently being piloted by teachers in each school).
• Stakeholder feedback - 10% - We have chosen to use the SEED model for this portion.
• Whole-school student learning - 5% - We have chosen to use the SEED model for this portion.

For the teacher performance (observations) portion, we must craft a proposal to SDE that adheres to the guidelines.  We chose not to use the SEED model for this portion for a number of reasons.  Chief among which were that we had already begun to investigate and pilot Marshall before the legislation was passed; and the Marshall rubrics are simpler to use and understand than the SEED model.

I would strongly encourage all educators to visit www.connecticutseed.org to learn more about these sweeping changes.

As this process moves forward I will continue to keep you updated.  Thanks for reading.

Webb's Depth of Knolwedge

Hello,

Today, we had another excellent meeting of the system-wide Curriculum & Instruction Committee (Chaired by Sherrod McNeill).  The committee has been working on becoming more expert in the Common Core State Standards and their many implications on our work.  Today, Sherrod led us through an activity that helped us gain a better understanding of Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK).  This can best be thought of as an alternative to Bloom's Taxonomy.  This is key learning for all teachers in our school system as the CCSS are correlated with the DOK rather than Bloom's.  We saw a short, explanatory video that I strongly recommend to you.