Stephanie Jackman spends a lot of time evaluating her 44 teachers at Lafayette Elementary School in Colorado. Like her fellow principals across the country, she sits in on their classes, jots down notes, and provides feedback on what areas teachers could improve.
Often that鈥檚 where the conversation ends. But Jackman鈥檚 school district, Boulder Valley, has gone a step further, merging its vast catalog of professional-development courses with its teacher evaluation system to create one resource.
, teachers and their evaluators use an online platform to pick out which of the district鈥檚 educator-effectiveness standards the teacher is going to tackle during the year. Then they see the specific professional learning opportunities across the sprawling 500-square-mile district that will help teachers reach their goals.
鈥淛ust visually, it鈥檚 all linked,鈥� Jackman said.
While teacher evaluations and professional-development programs are ubiquitous in school districts around the country, rarely do the two meet. Evaluators may accurately pinpoint the areas where a teacher needs to improve, but that鈥檚 often the end of the conversation鈥攖eachers are left to their own devices to figure out what kinds of professional development they need to better their craft. MyPassport is meant to eliminate the need for teachers to guess whether a given PD opportunity will really help them.
The idea is not to play 鈥済otcha鈥� with teachers who are not excelling on all 25 teacher effectiveness standards, but to instead support them in improving their craft, said Mary Jo Bode, the professional learning director in the district, which serves 31,000 students in 56 schools that run the gamut from one-room schoolhouses to large, comprehensive high schools.
鈥淎s for professional development, all we were doing was compliance. In our old system, we were just tracking how many hours you had toward getting recertification,鈥� said Bode. 鈥淣ow a teacher sits down with an evaluator for a conversation around this question of what are the areas that would benefit you and your students the most?鈥�
In 2010, Colorado passed Senate Bill 191, a contentious educator-effectiveness law that requires that at least 50 percent of a teacher鈥檚 evaluation score be based on a measure of student growth, and made sweeping changes to teacher tenure rights. The bill forced the district to overhaul its teacher evaluation system.
Around the same time in Boulder, a pair of local philanthropists鈥擲uzanne Hoover, who had been a teacher and school board member in another community, and her husband David鈥攄onated $1 million to Boulder Valley to build a professional-development academy. Bode said that as the district saw these dual initiatives coming down the pike, it decided to merge the two efforts.
鈥淲hat we realized was, if we are asking someone to show improvement in an area and we don鈥檛 offer anything to help them, that鈥檚 a very hollow and disappointing message,鈥� said Bode.
By December, just a few months after launching the system, BVSD staff鈥攖he MyPassport program has expanded beyond teachers to include all employees鈥攃ould already choose from 376 classes available on the MyPassport platform. The course list is constantly growing as Bode鈥檚 three-person team works with employees across the district. There鈥檚 a knife-skills class that was requested by food-service employees, an email-writing course that some staff members who speak English as a second language asked for, and even a course to teach high-flying educators how to design and launch their own MyPassport courses.
While Bode now heads the operation, a committee she co-chairs with Tina Mueh, the president of the Boulder Valley Education Association, the district teachers鈥� union, built MyPassport. Both Bode and Mueh agree that this work would have been a lot harder without getting the buy-in of the teachers鈥� union. Mueh, for her part, was happy to see the district link its evaluation and professional-development systems.
鈥淚鈥檝e been in this district for about 25 years, and I can say that we never had an evaluation system that was tied to anything, or really even meaningful,鈥� said Mueh. 鈥淎nd as for our professional-development system, you would take all of these little classes, but the district wasn鈥檛 tracking that. You would turn scraps of paper in, but no one was tracking if this was helping you reach your goals, or improving outcomes for students, or helping the district reach its goals.鈥�
By collecting data on what professional development is working and tying it into information on teacher performance and student outcomes, the district is identifying what professional-development programming is and isn鈥檛 working. The district has already reined in what kinds of courses teachers can take to reach their evaluation goals and climb the salary scale. For instance, after establishing tougher criteria for what courses would count for climbing the salary ladder, the number of courses eligible for salary credit dropped from 400 to 60, though that number is growing again as the system adds new, more-rigorous courses.
鈥淭here was pushback,鈥� Mueh admitted. 鈥淏ut as I think about our committee, the people with the highest standards for their colleagues are members of the [education] association. They are teachers themselves who are saying, 鈥榦ur profession needs this if we are going to be taken seriously.鈥� We can鈥檛 tolerate professional development that doesn鈥檛 live up to the standards that we hold ourselves to as professional educators.鈥�
