Leveraging Performance Management to Support School Priorities

1. Leveraging Performance Management to Support School Priorities Professional Development for evaluators Day 2: Wednesday, September 26, 2012

2. Today’s Agenda • Setting goals that are aligned and SMART • Writing Action Plans tied to goals • Identifying evidence from artifacts and observations • Selective scripting • Rolling all evidence up into ratings

3. Chris McCloud: Self-assessment against the rubric 3

4. Getting to Goal Topics • Your school-level analysis should drive your student learning goals. • Your student learning goals should drive your professional practice goals. Goal-setting is not done in a vacuum! Needs Analysis Student Professional Learning Practice - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

5. Setting Goals that are Aligned and SMART Evaluators will: • Identify what makes a goal SMART • Practice skills to revise SMART goals • Develop strategies to ensure alignment between teacher and school goals • Create sample goals for teachers • Know what follows goal-setting

6. Where do I need to grow this year? Where do I want my students to grow this year? Understanding Goal Setting

7. Proposing and Setting Goals • Rationale for goal-setting • Based on the educator’s self-assessment • At least: • One goal for student learning, growth and achievement, and • One goal for professional practice • Consider team, grade, or department goals • Educator proposes; supervisor determines • BEFORE educators set goals: • Measure practice against performance standards on rubric for the Professional Practice goal • Examine student data for the Student Learning goal

8. Attributes of a Strong Goal Specific Measurable Attainable Results-Focused Time-bound Remember, the key to make sure the goal is written clearly enough so that both teacher and evaluator can determine the teacher’s degree of success in meeting the goal.

9. Sample Professional Practice Goal With your table, consider this goal: 7th grade math In order to support my ELL students in averaging 80% on unit assessments, I will consistently identify and teach symbols, key terms and other math vocabulary, and use daily exit tickets that measure both vocabulary and conceptual understanding. I will measure my progress through student vocabulary notebooks and tracking exit ticket performance data twice a month from now until May 15. Does this goal meet criteria for SMART?

10. Sample Professional Practice Goal • Specific: Focused on a sub-group of students (ELL), clear about which strategies will be taught • Measurable: Can measure by analyzing student notebooks and exit tickets • Action-Oriented: The teacher will implement teaching strategies that are likely to improve student learning in the area he is measuring • Realistic: The teacher wants / needs to teach these strategies already. • Time-bound: Completion date for action (May 15) is included in the goal.

11. Activity: Re-writing Goals to be SMARTer With your colleagues, review the worksheet of goals: • Determine whether they are Student Learning (SL) or Professional Practice (PP) goals • Assess the strength of the goal • Describe how you would revise the goal

12. A few more considerations… Let’s revisit some of these goals and think about…

13. Consideration #1 – Set Goals on Leading vs. Lagging Indicators • Leading Indicator = an indicator that comes first, and causes, contributes to, or partially predicts outcome on a lagging indicator • Lagging indicator = an indicator that comes later, and is a result of or partially predictable based on a leading indicator • Choose a leading indicator your team can influence! Daily attendance Quarterly grades Freshman GPAs High school graduation rate Reading skills Homework completion Hours sleep per night

14. Consideration #2 – What data is your greatest leverage point? Questions to ask: • What data do we have? • Be pragmatic and use what you have whenever possible, but don’t sacrifice quality, reliability, or instructional relevance! • Where is the momentum in your system? • Work with it – “be the water, not the rock” • Where are kids’ skills? • Focus your goal – and thus your work – on your students’ limit to growth. Yeah, yeah – but your blood pressure is in the healthy range!

15. Consideration #3 – Absolute Performance vs. Growth

16. Professional Practice Goal School Goals District Goals Educator Evaluation Aligning Goals to School Priorities • Goal-setting should support your school’s goals • What are your school priorities? • You will now write sample teacher goals to help you further your school priorities. Student Learning Goal

17. Sample Teacher Goals Aligned to School Priorities • Identify one or two priorities in your school. • Identify one of your school’s goals for student learning. • Based on one of your school’s goals for student learning (step #2), craft a sample student learning goal that could be adaptable for many of your teachers. Use the template in the “Guidance for Writing Goals” worksheet. • Examine the Rubric of Effective Teaching and select one or two elements that support achievement of that student learning goal (in step # 3, above). • Using the goal template in “Guidance for Writing Goals,” construct a draft professional practice goal for one of those elements identified in step #4. Keep this goal flexible enough so that teachers can adapt it to their own content areas, classrooms, and students. • Share these goals with colleagues and be prepared to share with the group.

18. Aligning Goals to Support Whole-School Improvement

19. Goal Proposal in EDFS • Propose one goal for student learning and one for professional practice • Evaluator will accept or return goals for further revision • Templates are included in the EDFS to support the goal-writing process

20. EDFS: Student Learning Goal Proposal

21. EDFS: Professional Practice Goal Proposal

22. EDFS: Goal Approval

23. Action Plan Development

24. Action Plan Development After the evaluator approves the educator’s goals, they will work with each other to develop an action plan that will detail which steps need to be taken to accomplish the educator’s goals. Developing the plan together encourages conversations that build relationships and a shared understanding of high quality professional practice.

25. EDFS: Action Steps and Plan Development • Each goal must have action steps to support educators’ completion of the goal • The action steps develop the plan into actionable steps including: • Actions; • Supports or resources required; • Timeline and frequency. • These steps will also be entered into the EDFS

27. Activity: Developing an Action Plan Using the Action Plan Development Worksheet as a guide, work with a partner to develop an Action Plan to support a professional practice goal that one of you developed from the previous SMART goal activity. After you have finished, talk with your partner about whether this action plan would make it highly likely that the accompanying student learning goal (from the previous SMART goal activity) could be achieved.

28. Evidence Observation & Artifacts

29. Identifying Evidence from Artifacts and Observations Evaluators will understand: • The difference between evidence and opinion • How to identify evidence from an observation using selective scripting • What an artifact is, and how to identify evidence in an artifact • Types of artifacts

30. The 5-Step Cycle in Action • Every educator is an active participant in an evaluation • Process promotes collaboration and continuous learning Continuous Learning

31. Collection of Evidence in EDFS • Both educators and evaluators are permitted to upload evidence to the EDFS • Evidence should be robust, allowing evaluators to assess across multiple rubric areas

33. Evidence collected on … Progress on Ratings on OVERALL (2) Goals (4) Standards RATING

34. Evidence Collection Cycle • Evaluator collects and educator submits artifacts. • Evaluator makes fact-based statements about evidence of practice and progress toward goals contained in artifacts. • Evaluator aligns evidence statements with standards and indicators and goals. • Evaluator provides feedback to educator using language from the rubric. • Evaluator rates educator practice before the formative or summative evaluation. 34

35. Objective Evidence EVIDENCE • Prove or disprove • Make plain or clear • Indication or sign OBJECTIVE • Not influenced by personal feelings or prejudice • Unbiased • Something that can be known (as opposed to a “gut feeling”) As an evaluator you will – of course – use your professional judgment throughout the process but, by consistently using objective evidence and scoring it against the rubric, you will be both fair and rigorous

36. Levels of Evidence INSUFFICIENT • After lunch, I noticed that you were not teaching. SUFFICIENT • After lunch, I noted you sitting at your desk while students got settled. EXEMPLARY • The required math block falls right after lunch. 15 minutes into that block I noticed that you were sitting at your desk looking at your computer. When I went into your classroom to see what students were doing, they were reading or working on non-math worksheets.

37. Quality of Evidence reflection questions • Is the evidence factual and free of opinion? • Is the evidence high quality? • Does the language of the evidence reflect the language in the rubric with differentiates “needs improvement” from “effective” practice in each element? • Does language of the evidence reflect the language in the rubric which helps to determine what “exemplary” practice looks like in each element? • Is there a preponderance of evidence to support a particular judgment about the performance level? • Is there enough evidence to make a judgment about the performance level? If not, what additional evidence could you collect to strengthen the decision? How could the artifacts be strengthened so that you could collect more high-quality evidence?

38. Evidence Statements

39. Evidence from Observations

40. Observing Lessons … CAUTION! … We observe all the time, which means that it is easy to do, but hard to do objectively. • Remember • We tend to see what we want to see • We have to be aware of and avoid bias, particularly personal idiosyncrasies • We have to avoid preconceptions • Observation should be based upon agreed criteria

41. Observation Bias

42. Observation of Chris McCloud: Selective Scripting • Read over the three excerpted elements from the rubric. • Watch the video. • Examine the supporting documents. • While you are watching the video and reading documents, collect evidence that will allow you to rate Mr. McCloud on the three elements. Use the worksheet to selectively script evidence related to each of the elements. • When you are finished, complete the worksheet and rate Mr. McCloud.

43. How did you do?

44. Observations in the EDFS • BPS is currently developing an observation tool mobile app • Observational evidence will be uploaded to EDFS, and tagged to an appropriate category of the rubric • Observations may only be used in formative or summative evaluations if the educator received feedback within 5 days of the observation

45. Observation Mobile App

46. What’s Next? All evidence has to be uploaded to EDFS – even if the hard copy is not scanned, it has to be tagged as evidence and a hard copy kept in a binder. Once you have collected evidence, you’ll give feedback to the teacher. The online system is not a substitute for face-to-face conversation.

47. Artifact Evidence

48. How detailed should an artifact be and how do you decide it demonstrates progress within an element, indicator, or standard? Artifacts: • Can be used as supporting evidence of meeting an element or an indicator within a standard to show examples of teacher performance and practice. • Can be used as evidence towards achievement of goals. • Artifacts should include evidence for multiple standards, indicators, or elements.

50. Collecting and Assessing Evidence - Artifacts In this session you will work with artifacts. They include: • Student assessment data • Student work • Lesson plan review • Review of teacher-made assessments How many other types of artifacts are there? Identify possible sources of evidence in the standard you are assigned.