At the Farmington Board of Education's regular meeting at Union School on Monday, Assistant Superintendent Kimberly Wynne and Director of Curriculum and Instruction Veronica Ruzek presented the teacher evaluation model the district will implement in the coming school year.
In order to align with new guidelines from the State Department of Education, the Farmington school district is adopting the new plan, setting standards for teachers based on teacher practice and student outcomes. Wynne insisted that the new plan will not come as a shock to teachers as many of the current evaluation practices are already in place and teachers are comfortable with the expectations.
"I feel so good about this model, because I feel nothing up there will be a surprise, we've shown this to many teachers and they love it, they say, 'no one is going to expect something from us that we don't expect from ourselves already,'" said Wynne.
The evaluation of teacher practice comes from a combination of observations by administrators, and the results of a stakeholder survey of parents and students. The nature of the survey raised some questions from board members who expressed concern that the surveys did not provide data on individual teachers, but rather the survey questions assessed the teachers within an entire school as a whole.
"I am afraid there might be a bystander effect," said member Betsy Kaplan, explaining that surveys might show up a collective deficiency but individual teachers might not take action because they believe someone else will.
Wynne noted that the data collected by the company administering the survey could provide individual teacher results retroactively, but that the district has chosen to receive the data collectively at the present time.
The student outcome evaluation will be based on goals set for students in the beginning of the year and data analyzed throughout the year and at the end of the year. Student achievement will count for 45% out of 50% of the outcome evaluation. The remaining 5% will be determined by the School Performance Index (SPI) score that each school in the district receives.
Teachers will be scored on a scale of one to four, from exceptional, effective, needing improvement, and innefective combining the teacher practice and student outcome criteria. Due to the rigors of the evaluation plan, Wynne said roughly 50% of Professional Development in the coming school year will be dedicated to teacher evaluations and assisting teachers in understanding the expectations placed on them by the plan.
Despite the extensive detail of the plan, administrators see the development plan as a continued work in progress, and expect to tweak the plan in the years to come.
Administrators plan to present a streamlined version of the plan to parents in the fall of 2013.
