January 2014

Illinois Formalizes Guidance for Evaluating and Supporting Beginning Teachers

By Liam Goldrick, Director of Policy

Educator evaluation systems are being designed and implemented in states across the nation. Very few states, however, have differentiated these systems for educators at different stages of their careers. While beginning teachers should not be held to a different performance standard than their veteran counterparts, they do require more intensive support and more frequent feedback to grow into highly effective practitioners.

Last February NTC released Cultivating Effective Teachers Through Evaluation and Support. Our report concluded that Illinois's existing state policies, including its educator evaluation law, did not provide sufficient growth and learning opportunities for beginning teachers. It offered a series of policy recommendations, including aligned induction programs or formative assessment opportunities as well as the use of teachers as mentors or peer evaluators.

We're pleased to report that, last month, the Illinois Performance Evaluation Advisory Council took our recommendations into account and formalized guidance for the evaluation of beginning teachers. The document provides examples of how to address the needs of beginning teachers in teacher performance evaluations in two main ways:

Utilize evaluation components and requirements to provide beginning teachers with regular performance feedback and support. This feedback and support will come as part of their performance evaluation, but may also come from an induction mentor who can provide feedback on classroom observations that are not included in the performance evaluation.
Align induction programs to the performance evaluation program. Induction and mentoring programs can help beginning teachers reach proficiency sooner. Illinois state policy defines induction programs, which are optional but not required for new teachers, which could provide the necessary depth and frequency of feedback to beginning teachers to accelerate their professional learning and strengthen their effectiveness in the classroom.

More specifically, the Illinois guidance suggests a number of approaches that school districts can use to structure observation requirements to ensure that beginning teachers receive regular and specific feedback on their performance. These include increasing the number of required observations for beginning teachers, implementing regular informal observation requirements, using post-observation conferences or other feedback mechanisms for informal observations, organizing the pacing of feedback throughout the school year, including mid-year evaluation conferences to discuss formative student growth data and other evaluation data, training evaluators to give high-quality, specific feedback on performance, and providing non-evaluative feedback to support the growth and development of beginning teachers.

The guidance also looks at aligning induction and evaluation. According to the document, an aligned induction program is "designed to work with the evaluation system so that evidence on teacher practice may be gathered in a coordinated way and the two systems work together to provide beginning teachers with support and guidance." It suggests that school districts can accomplish this by synchronizing the beginning teacher support with the performance evaluation rubric and observation processes and tools.

There are national implications to this work that must be recognized if we are to take seriously the research evidence about how beginning teachers learn and grow on the job. The growth trajectory of new teachers is something policymakers should seek to address as states seek to refine or revise their teacher evaluation policies in the coming years. As evidenced by our work and impact in Illinois, NTC has deep expertise in this work and could inform changes to such policies and systems in your state. We are grateful to the Joyce Foundation for its long-standing support of our work in the state of Illinois.

NTC News

Harvard Education Letter Highlights NTC, Induction

There is a shift away from bringing new teachers on board by pairing them with a "buddy down the hall" toward a more formal, comprehensive support system proven to make new teachers more effective from the start, according to a Harvard Education Letter article entitled "Getting Serious About Induction." In her article, Suzanne Bouffard highlights programs that have adopted a more comprehensive approach to teacher induction that is research-based and targeted to instruction and getting results.

"Hillsborough County, Fla., the eighth-largest district in the country, includes an intensive induction program in its Empowering Effective Teachers initiative, a comprehensive effort funded in part by a $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that also includes peer evaluation for both new and veteran teachers. The district has seen retention of first-year teachers jump from 72 percent the year before the program began to 94 percent after the second year. More importantly, third-year teachers who received two years of mentoring and other induction supports outperformed the district average on the number of teachers meeting the 'accomplished' criteria on observations of teacher effectiveness."

"New Teacher Center (NTC), a national nonprofit organization founded by teachers and based in Santa Cruz, Calif., works with Hillsborough County and other districts, schools, and states around the country to improve student achievement by increasing the effectiveness of new teachers and administrators."

Bouffard goes on to describe programs in place and several steps being taken to ensure program sustainability in Hillsborough County Public Schools, Rhode Island, Fairfax County, Virginia, and Austin, Texas - which all partner with NTC and have implemented our comprehensive model of new teacher induction.

Read more on the NTC website

Policy News

Kentucky Report Recommends Strengthening New Teacher Support, Use of TELL Data

Kentucky's Pritchard Committee for Academic Excellence published a report last month that recommends improvements to the teaching profession. It looked at numerous issues that affect teachers and the quality of teaching, including preparation, recruitment, compensation, induction, professional development, evaluation, and working conditions.

To better support new teachers, it recommends:

Establishing clearer methods to continuously evaluate and streamline the documentation requirements for the Kentucky Teacher Internship Program.
Ensuring that every teacher has a qualified mentor and that the mentoring relationship continues for a teacher's first three years on the job.
Giving new teachers more opportunities to work with master teachers.
Address new teachers' need for additional support as identified in the NTC-administered TELL Kentucky survey.
Discourage districts and schools from assigning new teachers to the most challenging teaching situations.

To assess and address issues related to educator working conditions, it recommends:

Continued encouragement of teachers to participate in the TELL Kentucky survey to produce the most complete information about school working conditions.
Scheduling the survey to conclude by the end of March before school personnel decisions are made.
Continued and expanded dissemination of the TELL survey results, with guidance to schools and districts in using the data.
Expanded time for teachers to review and study, individually and in teams, to improve instruction.

Washington Governor Proposes Teacher Mentoring Funding

The Seattle Times has reported that Washington Governor Jay Inslee has proposed $3 million for teacher mentoring in his FY2014 supplemental budget request. According to NTC state policy summaries, Washington does not require induction for beginning teachers, but has financially supported new teacher support in the past. In his State of the State Address on January 14th, Governor Inslee again signaled his support for an overall $200 million reinvestment in public education.

Good Reads

Treat Me Like a Student

In an article released by Getting Smart, Jeff Charbonneau, 2013 National Teacher of the Year, suggests that great education systems and great administrators mirror great classrooms. "We already know how to educate kids," he states. "Let's stop looking for new solutions, and instead scale up the solutions we already know work." Great classrooms, he explains, are hands on, filled with confidence, adaptable, student led, and positive. Great education systems value experience, support all participants, are flexible, teacher driven, and not afraid to showcase success. Administrators, he concludes, should be like great teachers and treat teachers as students. They should:

Allow staff to get hands-on with curriculum and professional development,
Foster confidence in teachers,
Adapt and change to allow flexibility,
Empower those around them, and
Celebrate and share success.

Educating Educators

Last month the Washington Post released the first in a mini-series of blogs by Mike Rose, professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education. In the blog post, Rose addresses some of the key challenges in educating student teachers for the rigor and the trial of the classroom. He defines teaching as the use of "knowledge to foster the growth of others." One of the biggest challenges to teacher preparation programs, he explains, is finding the critical balance between helping prospective teachers develop that content knowledge and helping them develop the skills to use that knowledge to foster student growth. Another challenge, he adds, is in determining the effectiveness of the institutions' training in improving student achievement.

PISA: Teachers as Professionals

In a recent Education Week blog, Marc Tucker explains that PISA data provide insight into practices that treat teachers as professionals and yield higher student achievement. These practices include:

Schools with autonomy from the larger system, but only when faculty participates in decision making;
Autonomy to work toward clearly stated goals; and
A "knowledge-worker model" in which teachers are not paid blue-collar wages.

Furthermore, the data indicate no relationship between competition (i.e. school choice) and overall student achievement.

There are many lessons to be learned from international comparisons. We highlighted some specifically related to training of prospective teachers in our November/December 2013 newsletter.

NTC Policy News is a monthly publication by the New Teacher Center. It is produced with funding support from the Joyce Foundation. Based in Chicago, Illinois, the Joyce Foundation invests in initiatives to improve public education and works to close the achievement gap by improving the quality of teachers in schools that serve low-income and minority children.

In This Issue

Illinois Formalizes Guidance for Evaluating and Supporting Beginning Teachers

Harvard Education Letter Highlights NTC, Induction

Bloomberg EDU Interviews Ellen Moir

Kentucky Report Recommends Strengthening New Teacher Support, Use of TELL Data

Washington Governor Proposes Teacher Mentoring Funding

Good Reads

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NTC's 2013 Annual Report outlines the organization's latest work and accomplishments as we continue our efforts to improve student learning by focusing on teachers.