In the 2023/2024 academic year, we’ve undertaken a significant overhaul of our Professional Growth and Evaluation system. This initiative builds upon the successful pilot program we implemented during the 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 school years, aligning with our Futures Plan within the Talent Strategy. This plan underscores our commitment to recruiting, nurturing, and retaining staff members who exemplify our school’s mission and core values.
Within the dedicated framework of our Talent & Professional Growth Strategic Pathway, our primary aim is to craft a comprehensive professional growth, wellbeing, and evaluation structure. This framework adheres to the best practices in the field and remains deeply connected to our vision for an AISC learner. It also incorporates faculty learning and development, ensuring that our educators continue to thrive and evolve. Faculty members were initially introduced to these new standards at the end of the 2022/2023 academic year and then again at the start of the 2023/2024 school year. The new standards are as follows:
- Embraces Responsibility
- Models Growth
- Leads Others
- Innovates
- Collaborates
- Communicates
- Builds Community
- Embeds Wellbeing
- Demonstrates Integrity
For our first-year teachers, we’ve assigned the following standards:
- Embraces Responsibility
- Communicates
- Embeds Wellbeing
As for our experienced educators, they have the flexibility to select the standards that best align with their teaching practices and the projects they’re pursuing in the current year. In the initial year, focusing on “Embraces Responsibility” could mean that teachers:
- Demonstrate an awareness of each student’s strengths and areas for growth, substantiated by photos of artifacts or videos showcasing classroom interactions that exemplify nurturing and challenging students.
- Utilize a system for gathering, reviewing, and acting upon student input, supported by student testimonials, exit tickets, and survey data.
Teachers may be setting personal, professional goals that may include:
- Offering differentiated instruction as a means of providing individualized levels of challenge and support.
- Using student feedback data to gauge perceived levels of challenge and support.
The evidence that teachers present to show goal attainment, may include:
- Student feedback data (exit tickets, surveys, etc.).
- Reflections on feedback, subsequent actions identified, the impact of those actions.
- Student feedback survey results demonstrating a positive change from the first semester to the second semester in relevant questions.
By this stage of the school year, nearly all our teachers have already had their meetings with their supervisors to discuss the standards they’ve selected and the projects designed to help them achieve those objectives. In these meetings, both teachers and administrators share the responsibility for reaching these goals and measuring their progress. Administrators will closely support teachers in tracking their goal achievement through the PG&E forms.
With this innovative approach to professional growth and evaluation, we aim to foster a dynamic, reflective, and continuously improving community of educators who are wholly committed to nurturing our students’ growth and success.
Jennifer Bertram
Middle School Principal