Professional Development | News

Illinois To Train Teacher Assessors With Online Tools

• By Mike Hohenbrink
• 03/28/12

The Illinois State Board of Education will deliver online training and evaluation for its teacher assessors as part of a statewide effort to train and certify more than 7,000 teacher evaluators.

The move is being undertaken as a result of the state's Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA) and includes a partnership with the Consortium for Educational Change (CEC), a nonprofit organization that works to improve student learning, and Teachscape, a provider of services and technologies to improve teacher performance.

Training and assessment will take place primarily by means of the Framework for Teaching Proficiency System developed by Teachscape in partnership with Charlotte Danielson and Educational Testing Service (ETS).

The Proficiency System has its origins in the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project that was funded through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to determine how effective teaching could be identified and developed.

Features of the Proficiency System include:

• More than 100 master-scored videos that cover all K-12 proficiency ranges;
• More than 15 hours of self-paced training;
• Observer training with 11 online professional development modules;
• Scoring practice with videos of actual classrooms; and
• Proficiency testing.

Previous districts partnering with Teachscape to use the Proficiency System include Pittsburgh Public Schools and Syracuse City School District.

The Proficiency System training will be augmented by the CEC through online modules, in-person sessions designed to go into detail on the state's legal requirements, professional conversations, and student measures.

"The Illinois State Board of Education required a scalable, rigorous, consistent, affordable training solution that could support the new statewide performance evaluation system," said Mary Jane Morris, executive director of the CEC. "The Framework for Teaching Proficiency System is that solution. We could not have taken on this challenge without Teachscape's Framework for Teaching Proficiency System. It is a best-in-class evaluator training program."

More information about the Framework for Teaching Proficiency System is available at teachscape.com.