We have approximately 60 faculty members, and I regularly describe them in one word: eager. The adults at Sage Hill are ready and willing to improve, to grow, and most important, to provide extraordinary learning opportunities for students. In recognizing this, I wanted to find a way to identify and engrain this representative quality so that it became part of the fabric of the school and to instill, sustain, and support it in all teachers, current and future.
In my first year at Sage Hill, I worked closely with the department chairs to assess the teacher evaluation process. We began this evaluation at the start of the school year with a series of collaborative classroom walkthroughs. By the end of September, I had visited each teacher’s classroom at least once with their respective department chair. As the department chairs and I completed our walkthroughs, we began to calibrate a process for classroom visits, we provided brief instructional feedback for each teacher, gathered themes per department, and shared larger patterns with the entire faculty. As we discussed the importance of linking teacher evaluation to teacher growth, learning, and professional development we quickly reached a unanimous conclusion: We wanted a more thorough, robust, self-reflective, and growth-oriented process. In fact, we believed that we had the responsibility to develop and align our understanding of and expectations for extraordinary teaching, growth-oriented feedback processes, and our professional development resources. I theorized that if we could clearly identify what it meant to be an exceptional teacher at Sage Hill School, then we could also develop processes to ensure progression toward those standards.
The Process
In January 2017, I invited the entire faculty to nominate themselves or a colleague to re-examine the existing teacher evaluation model. A few weeks later I invited a cohort of three (nominated and elected) at-large faculty members to join myself, the department chairs, the dean of academic technology, and the assistant director for inclusion and outreach in this endeavor.Our first meeting began with an outline of the process by articulating two questions we needed to answer, in priority order:
- What does it mean to be an exceptional teacher at Sage Hill School?
- What are the habits, characteristics, qualities, competencies, and professional practices of exceptional Sage Hill teachers?
During this first meeting, I also set the expectation that the process unto itself would be a learning opportunity. The process of learning is rarely linear and often follows a pattern of clarity, then confusion, and then hopefully increased clarity—employing the metaphor of playing an accordion. I asked the team to embrace this and to expect uncomfortable moments when they feel confused or even overwhelmed. In other words, I asked them to trust each other and the process.
In our second and third meetings, we gathered our mission, values, and vision and pulled them together on one page. We added other mission-aligned language such as our commitment to inclusivity, diversity, equity and justice, and our core competencies. We dropped all this language into a word cloud, and the cohort discussed emerging themes and overriding values. I had also gathered several different examples of growth-oriented teacher evaluation models that have either been recommended as best practices, had research to support them, or were from similar schools (from both private and public schools with multiple levels of hierarchy). I removed the names and all attributable information from the documents and divided the members of the larger group into three smaller groups to carefully examine the different models. I asked my colleagues to discuss what resonated most with them, from language to layout; my direction here was intentionally vague. Most of the team had limited exposure to other teacher evaluation models. I wanted to increase their awareness, but I was also hoping to see if the three smaller groups would reach similar conclusions, and propitiously, they did.
But during our fourth meeting, things nearly fell apart. We’d had fun, very theoretical and philosophical conversations so far, but had produced nothing. So I started with the imperative that we now needed to get pen to paper and set a goal for the meeting: to identify themes that answer that second question about habits and characteristics of exceptional teachers.
The mood in the room shifted and tension rose. This felt like a daunting task. Some people in the group wanted to jump directly to “how” we were going to do all this—how are we going to evaluate teachers? How would this help teachers grow? How do we implement a new process/evaluation system?—and I had to consistently remind them that we were working on the “why” first, then the “what,” and eventually we would be able to get to the “how.” This happened so frequently (“Chris, you are jumping to the ‘how,’ come back to the ‘why’ ”) that we tried to infuse a little humor, and I asked them to begin policing each other. The most frequent process-jumpers began to start their questions or comments with “I’m pretty sure I’m skipping a step here, but…” To those, we would simply acknowledge that he or she was indeed skipping steps, and we would get back to work.
During our next meeting, we agreed on two mission- and value-aligned themes: knowledge and community. We divided into two groups based on these themes and worked to articulate the difference between a “definition,” a statement for exact meaning, and a “standard,” a description of a level or quality of attainment. Within two more meetings we had drafted and revised what is now deemed “Standards for Exceptional Teaching at Sage Hill School” or SETS, for short. I brought a draft of SETS to the administrative team and to the faculty for feedback. In the following meeting, we were able to revise the standards based on feedback from both groups, and by June of 2017 we had a final version of SETS ready for launch during the 2017–18 school year.
The What and the How (Finally)
Exceptional teachers are reflective practitioners. Like great doctors, they constantly observe, diagnose, and implement a treatment. They share their distillations with their colleagues. They are integral parts of the school community, often beyond their classroom responsibilities. The teacher evaluation and career development model we developed reflects this.It’s a model designed to provide continual growth for all teachers, every school year, and strives to provide unique experiences that strike a balance of collaboration, feedback, goal-setting, autonomy, and reflection. It reflects the natural elements of an adult learning cycle (experiencing, reflecting, generalizing, and applying) and recognizes that teachers will be at various points of professional development. It is tailored to faculty at different career stages and includes five different phases. (See “Standards for Exceptional Teaching (SETS) Phases” sidebar below.)
I had always intended to switch the entire teacher evaluation process from a school-year calendar to a calendar-year process—a caveat that the entire group knew about from the outset. This approach provides the gift of time. In particular, summertime, when teachers have the ability to learn, grow, develop, and refresh in earnest—instead of constantly trying to build the plane as they fly it during the school year. Second, it urges teachers to think about their professional growth and development beyond the students they have in their immediate classes, encouraging longer, more sustained growth and development. Exceptional teachers are constantly adapting to the students and classes they have in front of them. And if teachers can make a change that improves student learning and can be reproduced across segments of students, they will benefit from the time to develop, enhance, and scale it for duplicate results.
Key Takeaways
Our full implementation began in January of 2018, and thus far, faculty have brought their same eagerness to this new process that I observed nearly two years ago. SETS is a useful new platform that systematizes and enhances teacher growth, evaluation, and professional development. Further, the cohort of teachers that helped develop SETS is extremely proud of their work and commitment to each other. In leading the process, I strived to corrolate my personal vision for SETS without over-scripting the actual outcome. Just as I asked the teachers to trust me and the process, I also had to trust the teachers and the process.There were certainly times where I was feeling the accordion effect, and I had to make decisions on whether to tweak the process or to let it play out. I found that being transparent and honest with those decisions (or nondecisions) as they arose helped. For example, I shared my personal concerns about our lack of productivity when I set an audacious meeting goal that I knew was going to make people feel uncomfortable. Many of these tricks are right out of a design-thinking playbook: modify time and use restrictions to enhance creativity and production. But the reason this group was so productive and effectual was because they believed in the meaning of the work and, ultimately, they trusted each other. Which leads me to my original observation about the faculty at Sage Hill School: They are eager to be exceptional. ▪
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