Until last year, many school districts evaluated teachers the old-fashioned way — with paper and pencil.
Today, with more state requirements and more riding on the evaluations, school districts are moving toward online evaluation programs for teachers and principals who face the same scrutiny.
During the past year, the School Town of Highland began using a program called Standard for Success, developed by Daviess County educator Todd Whitlock. It’s one of several online programs available to school districts to streamline the process.
Warren Elementary Principal J.J. Boylan said there’s one evaluation model for teachers and another for administrators.
Like teachers, principals are rated highly effective, effective, improvement necessary and ineffective. Boylan said the grade his school receives from the state also is factored into his evaluation.
He said Whitlock’s software is working well. “Standard for Success lends itself for recording our observations and matching it up with evidence we find for the rubric. It will cut down hours of work, if you had to do it on paper with pencil.”
The cloud-based software keeps track of meetings teachers have with administrators and uploads information that demonstrates skill sets. “It gives us reminders of what needs to be done,” Boylan said.
Whitlock said he knew when Public Law 90 passed requiring evaluations that a better, more uniform process would be needed.
“With the amount of data we were collecting, paper and pencil would not work. Teachers also have the responsibility to collect data to give a true picture.”
So far, 54 Indiana districts are using the software endorsed by the Indiana Association of School Principals.
“Our goal is to be in six more states by end of the year and 15 more states by the end of 2015.”
School districts can contract for the software. Whitlock said the average cost is about $25 a staff member.