Teacher Observations and Professional Development:

At the start of every school year, school districts across the country send out mailers welcoming new and veteran teachers back to school for yet another academic year.  During these first few days before school starts for students, often called learning improvement days for teachers, district and school level leaders at each school and district plan various types of staff development for teachers on such topics as building logistics, pedagogy, curriculum, assessments, cross-cultural training, etc.   

In preparing for these back-to-school learning activities for teachers, what data and information do administrative leaders use to plan the staff development they provide to teachers?  Are there ways in which teacher evaluations can help pinpoint and inform systems level learning on the delivery of staff development throughout the year? Is the data from teacher evaluations even available to inform district and school systems to respond with deliberate and targeted resources teachers need in the classroom?

The problem of practice involves the teacher evaluation process and centers around an inadequate process for accessing data from teacher evaluations.  In one high school study, it took 15 hours to make sense of 52 formative classroom observations performed by one school administrator.  Had the remaining observations performed by the two other school administrators at the school been included, countless more hours would be required.  The time that it takes to make sense of hundreds, even thousands, of teacher evaluations by school and district administrators simply takes too long at the time when decisions need to be made. 

With limited time and limited resources to offer professional development to teachers throughout the year, teacher evaluation data needs to be readily available in order to allow administrators the opportunity to have real-time data to become instructional leaders and address the teacher content and skills gap to improve student achievement.

Teacher Evaluations and Professional Development are two of the most important duties district and school administrators perform in increasing student achievement.  Teachers’ perceptions of the teacher evaluation process is that outside the two standard evaluations, evaluations do not impact what goes on in the classroom.  Administrators’ perceptions are that data from teacher evaluations simply is not available.  Linking the two is the most important task educational leaders must concentrate on in order to take teacher evaluations from a procedural duty to a more meaningful learning experience that informs district/school administrators system wide. 

Bringing coherence to professional development and teacher evaluations is a tremendous challenge without an adequate system in place to provide leaders with the real-time information needed to impact and sustain teacher and student learning in classrooms at the systems level. 

With all the advances in technology, the education profession seems slow to integrate the latest in technology to target teacher learning.  Professional Development Solutions created RealTimePD Optimizer to address this challenge in education and provide school and district administrators with a necessary leadership tool to optimize the evaluation process in order to target professional development to the real needs of teachers on a daily basis.  In this new standards-based era, real-time evaluative data will help district/school administrators measure teaching effectiveness, evaluate program implementation, target professional development around identified needs, build organizational history, and lead to capacity building in order to improve teacher content and skills to address the achievement gap.

As per some teacher contracts, teachers are required to earn many hours of staff development per year. RealTimePD Optimizer helps build a relationship around student learning between teacher, unions, and school/district, administrators.  The opportunity now exists to guide and provide teachers the training needed versus having teachers choose which staff development they want to attend simply because there was no systematic process by which to access information on teacher needs.  With RealTimePD Optimizer in place to provide pertinent information on teacher needs, administrators can specifically use teacher evaluations to inform the organization both at school and district levels on staff development throughout the year. 

Long gone are the days when professional development and teacher evaluations existed independent of each other.  Long gone are the days when teacher evaluative data was missing, difficult to locate, or simply not available in any meaningful way to guide organizations. In the 21st century of education, this data can and must be made available in real-time.

The organizational learning and leading that can occur from RealTimePD Optimizer provides a great opportunity for district/school leaders.  The public school system is under ever increasing pressure to raise student achievement, eliminate the achievement gap, to be more resourceful, and to help young teachers gain teaching experience sooner.  Professional Development Solutions provides the system software tool that can be used to interpret, store, and retrieve evaluative data in order to link staff development to teacher evaluations in real time. An expedient and blanket approach to staff development may succeed by chance.   However, we can not leave our education system up to chance.