Frank Adsit's Comments

Sorry for the delayed response. My crazy time is settling down and I can get you more information now. What we did was gather models from several schools similar to ours (through contacts our members had), we then discussed them and created our own. Our goal was to NOT have an instrument that was punitive. The overall goal is to stimulate professional development and growth in our teachers. We threw out ideas that seemed aimed at evaluating the quality of teachers in favor of ideas that would allow teachers to grow. That is what fit our school culture the best. In a nutshell, our adopted program, which is a work in progress, has each teacher in the "growth pool" every 4 years. The teacher and department chair create a committee which works with the teacher on what the teacher wants to work on. In the beginning it has mostly been folks visiting each other's classes and the ensuring discussions. The teacher who is "growing" is also supposed to develop a growth plan for themselves - answering some reflection questions and planning out professional development in an area in which they want to grow. In the first two years at the school, there is a more substantive "evaluation" that determines if the teacher should stay on. I've tried to attache a draft of our plan. If this doesn't work, send me your email address and I'll send one to you (my email is dvanryn@sstx.org. I'll ask if I can forward you copies of the plans from other schools we looked at.draftplan.doc

Hey--it's good to hear from you again! It does seem that life speeds up :)