Pennsylvania’s Educator Effectiveness Project

Lynne A. Snyder, Supervisor of Curriculum and Instruction

In 2010-11 the Pennsylvania Department of Education received an $800,000 Momentum grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the development of statewide policy, tools and processes to evaluate teachers and principals utilizing student achievement as a significant factor affecting performance ratings.

Pennsylvania's current evaluation method for teachers and principals is comprised solely on observations and does not factor in student achievement. It also only categorizes an educator as "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory."

The resulting Educator Effectiveness Project consists of several phases. During Phase I of the Teacher Effectiveness Project in 2010-11, three school districts and one intermediate unit participated in a pilot of the classroom teacher observation tool. During this past school year, Phase II, approximately 5,000 teachers and 650 administrators from 119 school districts, career and technology centers, charter schools and intermediate units participated, including Leechburg Area School District and Indiana County Technology Center in IU 28.

Administrators in Phase II were trained by intermediate units to use the new observation tool, which is based on Charlotte Danielson's "Framework for Teaching" and consists of four domains (Planning and Preparation, The Classroom Environment, Instruction, and Professional Responsibilities). Each domain then includes five to six more specific components. A descriptive rubric is then used to determine a four level of performance for each component (either Unsatisfactory; Needs Improvement/Progressing; Proficient; or Distinguished).

During this coming school year, districts are invited to participate in Phase III of the Teacher Effectiveness Project. This year's training for administrators will again be provided by intermediate units. Additionally, administrators will have the opportunity to participate in online training to establish inter-rater reliability, and teachers may complete several modules on PDE's Standards Aligned Systems website to learn more about the observation tool.

As the Educator Effectiveness Project continues, committees have also been established and are working to develop an observation tool for non-classroom teachers (school nurses, school psychologists, speech and language therapists, etc.), a system for measuring principal effectiveness, and the portion of the multi-measure system for both teachers and principals that incorporates student achievement data.