To help teachers improve, DC Public Schools has created a new program that centers on teachers working together to develop better ways to teach their curriculum. The hope is that the program leads to higher-achieving students and happier parents, along with better scores on teacher evaluations, which many new and experienced teachers have struggled with in the past.

Photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr.

Here’s how the new teacher development program will work

The new program, called LEAP (Learning together to advance our practice Learn, Earn, Advance, Prosper), will bring teachers of the same subject together in weekly, 90-minute sessions to discuss and develop better teaching methods based off the curriculum. LEAP leader, usually who are experienced educators, will guide each session, offering more more frequent, targeted feedback.

Using topics from the weekly curriculum, teachers and leaders will break things down, focusing on specific areas of teaching methodology, to determine how best to structure the lesson for student learning. For example, leaders may suggest a new way to present a piece of literature or teach fractions, also called a “key action step”, that teachers are encouraged to use in the classroom.

In order to assess a teacher’s development, program leaders will do 15 30-minute observations, focusing on these key action steps.

Image from DCPS.

With small, specific areas of development being the focus, teachers won’t be overwhelmed and leaders will have something concrete to evaluate. These observations are also meant to be informal, instructional, and non-punitive— they’re more about objective strategies for effective teaching, not subjective criticisms of the teacher.

DCPS’ teacher evaluation system has had problems, which LEAP should help with

While LEAP’s primary focus is on collaborative teacher development, it also hopes to fill gaps in DCPS’s current evaluation initiative, called IMPACT (not an acronym), which has been highly criticized for rating teachers but not adequately addressing development.

Introduced in 2009, IMPACT evaluates a teacher’s instructional expertise, incentivizing the highest performing teachers and pushing out consistently low performing teachers. IMPACT uses three criteria: student achievement data, the Teaching and Learning Framework (both a scoring rubric used to guide teachers and a set of criteria that defines effective teaching), and commitment to the community. Evaluations, now carried out only by principals, are unannounced and last 15 30 minutes.

At the end of the year After each evaluation, teachers receive a score marking them as highly effective, effective, developing, minimally effective, or ineffective. Teachers can be evaluated up to three five times per school year depending on the scores they receive. Highly effective teachers can earn bonuses up to $25,000 $20,000 , minimally effective teachers get a chance to improve, and ineffective teachers are dismissed.

Image from DCPS.

IMPACT is not without problems, however, and early on, many teachers complained the evaluations were two rigid and formulaic. Critics pointed out that getting a “highly effective” rating could be as simple as strictly following the IMPACT guidelines. Others felt the guidelines were not transparent enough and overly punitive, simply evaluating teachers without giving them much feedback.

DCPS has made changes to IMPACT that sought to fix early problems. Evaluations are now 15 30 minutes and done by principals only, and teachers are given time that isn’t subject to evaluation so they can try new teaching methods. The evaluation also includes student surveys about teacher effectiveness.

It should be noted that IMPACT also succeeded in increasing the instructional skills of highly effective teachers and saw student gains in math and reading.

A step in the right direction

LEAP is not perfect either, and will undoubtedly take some tweaking. One concern is that the 90-minute LEAP sessions will cut into the 225 minutes of weekly planning, not leaving teachers with enough time for lesson planning.

Another concern is that like IMPACT observations, the unannounced LEAP observations will make it difficult for leaders to observe teachers implementing the key action steps learned during the sessions. So, even though LEAP observations are not as high-stakes as IMPACT evaluations, they still do not mesh perfectly with the organic nature of teaching.

As IMPACT continues to evolve and LEAP goes through its growing pains, many kinks will likely be ironed out. But it should be helpful for teachers to have a powerful new tool at their disposal. Seeing as teaching is a skill that develops over many years, this program should encourage weaker, less experienced teachers to develop and grow in the profession.

The hope with LEAP is that it will take away some of the stress and pressure of evaluations under IMPACT. Under a program that specifically targets teaching skill and mastery development, teachers should be able to develop the tools and confidence they need to increase their IMPACT scores.

Over the course of the next year, I suspect these programs will continue to grow and set an example for other school districts.

Correction: After we published this post, we learned that it had a handful of errors. Each has been corrected above.

Matthew Koehler is currently a stay at home dad who formerly worked as an ESL teacher in Nagano, Japan and Washington, DC. When not chasing his three-year-old daughter around, he chronicles he fathering experiences in blog form and is always on the look out for obscure beers. For the time being, he resides in the ever-changing Southwest neighborhood, just down the street from Nationals Ballpark.