In over a year, Clarke County was able to create a new teacher evaluation system. So far, Director of Assessment and Accountability for the Clarke County Board of Education Tim Jarboe feels the feedback has been positive. “People (have been) stopping Dr. Lanoue or stopping me or stopping other people and telling us what they like or don’t like about it, but very soon, within the next month, we’re going to survey all of the teachers in the school district to give them all opportunity to give us some feedback, ” Jarboe said.
By JURNEE LOUDER – News Editor
This year, teachers will be graded with a new evaluation system created with TrueNorthLogic.
For over a year, teachers, professors and principals worked with the Clarke County Board of Education to make a more effective teacher evaluation system. Starting this year, teachers will be evaluated using a system similar to the state approved system, but with a district focus.
“The new evaluation system uses the teacher keys of evaluation system that the state of Georgia requires school districts to use. But (the new system) replaces those practices with the common commitments that teachers in our district developed,” Tim Jarboe, the Director of Assessment and Accountability for the Clarke County Board of Education, said.
The change came about after the district decided that the evaluation should be aligned with the focus of the school district.
“If that’s the focus of our school district and that’s the focus of our strategic plan that our local board of education approves, then we thought that those should be the instructional practices that we evaluate teachers with also.”
When a teacher gets evaluated, he or she is graded on five areas: planning practices, instructional practices, learning environment practices, professionalism and communication practices and assessment practices. Under those five areas are the common commitments.
“So, for example, if you look at the first one, ‘Planning Practices’, what you’ll see is, there are four sort of sub components. One is (does the teacher set) dedicated time for data planning which creates authentic lessons that align with required curriculum,” Jarboe said.
Teacher are observed during four walkthroughs and two formal observations by different evaluators depending on the size of the school. During every evaluation, the teacher is ranked on a scale of one (needing lots of improvement) to four (being exemplary).
“We’re really looking at ‘Are we supporting teachers in growing in their ability to implement those common commitments in an effective manner with kids?’ So, really, I guess I would say that three would be the expected level of performance, but you may be four on some standards, three on some standards, two on some standards,” Jarboe said.
Students’ ratings of teachers are also taken into account.
“The evaluator from that teacher has to look at the results of the surveys from students and take that into consideration when they’re assigning the final ratings to the teacher,” Jarboe said.
At the end of the year, teachers meet with their evaluators to discuss the results.
“They’re kind of given a final rating for the year. So, based on that end of year summative assessment, that becomes the teacher’s actual ratings that are reported to the state department of education,” Jarboe said.
Jarboe feels this year’s system will make more sense to teachers since it is more focused on the district’s standards.
“We think the new system will be less confusing to teachers because it’s based on the common commitments that they’re already trying to implement. Also, we’re using our own software system that actually, the company that’s providing our system is the same company that is providing the state their system,” Jarboe said. “ But since we can kind of control it, we can make some changes in how it shows screens and how it works in a way that we think will be a lot less clicks and more efficient for teachers in Clarke County to be able to experience.”
English department teacher Brian Ash likes how quickly he can view the feedback from the observations.
“I like that we can get feedback from our administrators very fast. It’s good to know what we’re doing good and what we’re doing not so good in a fast and prompt way,” Ash said.
