In my state we have a unique time frame for evaluations. They are entwined with our recertification process. In Maryland, certification is every five years. During those five years teachers are required to amass at least 6 hours of either course work or Continuing Education Credits (CEU’s). A Professional Development plan spanning those five years is submitted with the recertification paperwork.

The Evaluation process is a local decision that is within some state guidelines. In my county there are a number of tracks. Non-tenured, tenured, or second class. The difference is non-tenured can be anyone who is within their first three years of teaching and or in the school system. Tenured has its own divisions, one can be Standard Professional or Advances Professional. Here the difference is in the amount of approved college course hours beyond your bachelors. In my Maryland it is 30 hours. There is a difference in salary, but that is another story. The final class is reserved for only a few teaches. These are staff who are on an improvement plan and are in a sense frozen until they exit the plan or leave by choice or administrative action.

Our evaluation has four Domains: Planning and Preparation, Instruction and Assessment, Classroom Environment and Professional Practices. Each of these Domains has a number of indicators that are rated as either Observed or Needs Improvement. We do have the option to leave empty if we feel that not enough data supports a rating or it does not apply. This is a no foul. Below each indicator is space for the observer to include typed comments. These are not necessary, but I always select a few that I comment on. After each Domain, we rate the Domain as one of three (four for Non-tenured). They are Developing (for non-tenured), Effective, Highly Effective and Ineffective. Effective is the expected rating. This replaced the Satisfactory rating of our old system. At the end of Each Domain, we are required to write a narrative justifying the rating that was assigned. Finally, the program computes the final overall rating. We do have override authority. Each Domain is worth2.5 points for a Professional Practices score of 12. We add an additional 12 possible points from the SLO to get a total of 24. The teacher rating is based off of their total points out of 24. This provides their overall rating of Developing (for non-tenured), Effective, Highly Effective and Ineffective.

The strengths are it is easy to use. It becomes a click and type document. It is really easy if you use the prefill option (I despise it and choose to do mine by hand evaluating all of the observations) that drops every observation and all comments into the document. Keep in mind, non-tenured staff are formally observed twice in the first semester and evaluated in December and this process repeated for the second semester. Tenured staff only have two observations and an end of year evaluation. Another strength is in the PD that was done to work on interrater reliability

The weaknesses are many, as it is redundant. This is especially true for observation document. The pre-fill is awful to use. By being a click system that is too often relied upon, especially by supervisors.

We had the chance to move to another system. Unify was great to work with and they have tailored a number of improvements that both the teachers and administrators agreed to.