Evaluation Systems & Policy

You probably have engaged in the game Two Truths and a Lie as a team icebreaker and we wanted to try our own version… see if you can spot the lie among the truths regarding educator evaluation: Statement A = Truth Since 2010 school districts in over 44 states and D.C. have been implementing educator […]

A Post by Amy Tepper and Patrick Flynn “My powers are ordinary, only my application brings me success.” Sir Isaac Newton. In the last chapter of our new book Feedback to Feed Forward: 31 Strategies to Lead Learning, we highlight extraordinary practice of several districts and administrators. In that same chapter we provide six challenges […]

This past week I had the privileged to travel to Tianjin China and present at a Forum hosted by Tianjin University of Technology. The forum provided an opportunity for experts from various fields to collaborate and share ideas on potential ways that Big Data analysis could influence the future of their particular field. Presenters focused […]

*A follow up to my previous post – Connecting Teacher Action with Student Outcomes. This morning I attended a meeting of the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council (PEAC).  PEAC, charged with leading Educator Evaluation in the state of CT, began conversations today on the weighting associated with the current components of educator evaluation. It has been long […]

“Growth” has been one of the more elusive words in educational jargon over the past few years.  Its use triggers reactions from so many due to ill-fated or, better put, poorly constructed attempts to connect it to educator evaluation. Anyone who has read or spoken with me in-depth knows that I do consider student outcomes […]

A Sense of Hope for CT Education Listening to today’s news on the car ride to school with my son, a sense of tremendous optimism for CT education came upon me. In a decision that could fundamentally reshape public education in Connecticut, the state was ordered on Wednesday to make changes in everything from how […]

At ReVision Learning Partnership we want to ensure evaluator capacity focuses on high quality feedback. Teachers deserve to trust their observations. School administrators need to know evaluators can deliver feedback focused on student achievement. Taxpayers should demand an effective teacher for their children. For the last half decade schools have “ensured” evaluators calibrate against some video. […]

As teachers we have all been there. Stuffed into a dimly lit room with a speaker droning on while bullet point after bullet point in a useless PowerPoint flies by. Educators often have no escape from mandated professional development. They get rewarded not with learning but a certificate of showing up. A badge of being […]

Doing it right means so much more than getting it right. A lesson we have learned working with evaluators across the country, especially with teacher evaluations. At ReVision Learning we know the challenges of observing teachers, collecting evidence, and analyzing our notes against attributes and frameworks. We realize then taking all of this information and […]

What answer do you think you will get when you ask the average teacher which they would prefer: Have an evaluator observe and tell them what they did during the lesson? OR Have an evaluator help them understand how what they did during the lesson represented strengths in helping students learn, and to point out […]

As an educational community, it is time to reconsider our current approach to educator evaluation. Changes made over the past five years have turned performance review into a series of events strung together to monitor either teacher or leader performance within a school.  This narrow definition has been promoted by well-meaning policy makers and reinforced […]

It took twenty years of dialogue and professional learning to begin to break down the walls in educational leadership practice that distinguished a principal’s role as an instructional leader versus a manger of budget and buses. The new question in educational leadership is; “What is the distinction between the role of a principal as a […]