ANDERSON - When coming up with a plan to train teachers and report on their progress, Anderson Community Schools officials went straight to the source.
The ACS teacher peer evaluation program was approved at Tuesday's school board meeting and allows consulting teachers to coach and evaluate teachers who are new to the district. The ACS plan mirrors the original teacher peer evaluation program developed by the former president of the Toledo (Ohio) Federation of Teachers, known as the Toledo Plan.
"It works marvelously well," said Dal Lawrence, who created the Toledo Plan in 1981. "That's one of the reasons that people all over the country are interested in adopting it."
Since the Toledo school district adopted the plan in the early 1980s, other districts in Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Ohio, and Montgomery County, Md., have used the program to ensure their schools had quality teachers.
Lawrence has worked with 70-80 school districts across the country, including Anderson in the last few weeks. He visited the ACS staff, and groups of ACS school board members and administrators and Anderson Federation of Teachers members traveled to Toledo to witness the program in action.
"We were able to talk to administrators, principals and teachers," AFT President Rick Muir said. "We were able to watch the process in progress and actually work. We were able to see the consulting teacher report back about the interns."
In the Toledo Plan, consulting teachers have about eight to 12 new teachers they coach for two semesters, at the end of which they make a recommendation on whether the new teachers' contracts should be renewed.
Consulting teachers evaluate teachers for three years before returning to the classrooms themselves. They don't teach while consulting but instead coach, conference with and offer tips and after-school clinics to new teachers.
"It's really more than an evaluation tool; it's even more a support tool for beginning teachers," ACS Superintendent Mikella Lowe said. "The tough part about being a teacher is the classroom management, dealing with students who are talking when they shouldn't, not doing work."
Muir said Anderson's consulting teachers would be selected on a volunteer basis. They will be teachers, not administrators, who have at least five years of experience in the district. Consulting teachers will be observed teaching and selected by a panel.
Lowe said the district hoped for three consulting teachers.
In Toledo, about 10 out of 60 principals still have qualms with the program, Lawrence said, but most parents and teachers have come around after a lot of initial resistance there.
"There were a lot of turf issues involved," he said. "The administration didn't think teachers could do this kind of work. All those attitudes changed as soon as they saw the results."
Most parents also are on board now, Lawrence said.
"Once they see the purpose and once they see the seriousness of the program, it's hard to be against competent practice," he said.
About 8 percent of new teachers in the Toledo district don't make the cut after their peer evaluations, Lawrence said.
"There's no excuse for a school district to be lackadaisical about the induction process into the classroom," he said. "We're going to get teachers who are going to be with us. These are people we have invested some time and effort in. They are people that we know we want to have with us because they are meeting our standards."
The ACS plan was taken right from the Toledo Plan, and besides possible minor tweaking in the future, Muir plans to keep it the same.
"Instead of reinventing the wheel, we studied it enough to know it was what we wanted to do," he said.
The plan so far had been well received with minor resistance, he said.
"At this time I'm sure that not everybody in the district has bought into this, and I think in due time it will be like Toledo. I do truly believe after one year of operation it will be fully bought into. The only reason there is any doubt about it is that it's new and people haven't seen it in operation."
The AFT vote on the peer evaluation program wasn't unanimous, but was strongly favored by the union, Muir said.
"For it being new, and it's a process that's not just new to our district but new to the state of Indiana, there's always going to be questions and there's always going to be some that doubt it," he said.
Muir said that, although the evaluations will be taken seriously, the intent is to help teachers and give students a better education.
"If after we've given those first-year teachers everything they can be given, if they can't get there, then they won't be coming back to our district," he said. "We're not headhunting. We're here to help."