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Connecting teacher and leadership effectiveness with the Common Core State Standards.

By Sharon L. Contreras

When our school district began planning for Common Core implementation four years ago, we viewed it as an opportunity to build an educator-effectiveness system that focused on key practices and measures for accelerating student achievement. While the journey hasn’t been without some bumps, we have cultivated a new culture throughout Syracuse City School District (SCSD) that fosters collaboration and continuous improvement toward common goals. Due to the systematic implementation of our work, we’re already seeing an increase in graduation rates.

However, every journey needs a clear roadmap. To ensure success with limited time and resources, we intentionally focused on a particular set of priorities—a workable number of initiatives our district could implement that would most directly impact student outcomes and build capacity for sustainable growth. These effortscentered on constructing new instructional frameworks and progressive teacher and principal evaluation systems based on the Common Core.

Challenges

Located in an urban area with growing diversity and an evolving job market, SCSD was faced with lackluster student performance, trailing behind four other large school systems in the state. In fact, in 2011 only 48.4 percent of our students graduated on time. Given the wide range of needs in our district, it would be easy to get carried away and try to address them all at once. But by trying to do too much, any one effort becomes too diffused and isn’t given enough time and attention to be fully effective.

Before rolling out our Common Core–aligned professional development, we used a variety of programs and services that were often disconnected and not individualized. Teachers felt there was little continuity, and they sensed a lack of well-defined goals, and at times, conflicting direction. We needed to bring coherence to the multiple supports that our school leaders and teachers were receiving. My leadership team and I decided that the best way to provide this coherence would be to build a road map that would help our district focus its efforts on key strategies and practices that would increase instructional rigor and the complexity of classroom content.

Charting a Roadmap

Developing an educator-effectiveness system that aligned support and evaluation with the demands of Common Core standards required a well-coordinated effort. Partnering with Insight Education Group, we involved multiple and diverse groups of stakeholders—including teachers, school and district leaders, and union members. It was important for us to articulate the professional development experience we envisioned—one that was grounded in adult learning with differentiation for each school and educator. The process involved the following steps:

• Create a Core Planning Team with broad representation to move the comprehensive work forward.
• Conduct a broad-based review of relevant research and existing instructional effectiveness documents.
• Analyze the state’s Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS).
• Construct the Teaching and Learning Framework and Rubric for evaluation informed by this substantial foundation.
• Obtain meaningful feedback from instructional leaders and teachers.
• Build confidence in the validity of the tools.
• Define a path to professional development that would support the new Common Core practices.

The resulting SCSD Teaching and Learning Framework and rubric is intended to serve as a tool to aid in the observation, coaching, development, and evaluation of classroom teachers. It outlines expectations and strategies around four core practice areas: planning, teaching, the learning environment, and analysis and adjustment. The rubric is used to guide conversations about the development and growth of all teachers. Rather than using the rubric as a checklist, observers rate teachers based on the “preponderance of evidence” collected. This means that a teacher may not demonstrate every measure on the list, but observers should use their professional judgment to determine ratings and subsequent growth plans.

Strengthening the New Frameworks

It wasn’t enough to simply establish the roadmap, however; it was critical to create processes to ensure teachers had the training and support they needed to achieve the core practices outlined in the framework. We also needed to build knowledge and capacity for observing, coaching, and rating teachers, and for effective implementation of the Common Core. As a result, we added these steps:

• Conduct professional development for teachers, including coaching and video-based observation and feedback, designed to clarify and model the instructional practices described in the Teaching and Learning Framework.
• Provide common planning time in which teachers are able to meet weekly during the school day to address challenges and share best practices.
• Construct a Building Leadership Framework and Rubric for all principals in the district.
• Design a third aligned rubric, in concert with the other two, to serve as the foundation for the recruitment, training, and evaluation of vice-principals.
• Provide training to school leaders on how to coach and develop both high and low performing teachers.
• Establish observation-rating norms and conduct periodic recertification to ensure that principals consistently use commonly understood expectations.
• Develop a certification process for principals to ensure that teachers are evaluated equitably using the revised frameworks and evaluation systems.

Promising Results

I’ve heard from school leaders and teachers across the district that the frameworks and processes now in place have enabled them to build out instructional priorities, bring coherence to their work, and document our bright spots. It’s also dramatically improved collaboration among teachers and principals. The job of an administrator or teacher can often be isolating, and it’s important as district leaders to provide the right supports to help educators in the adoption of new frameworks in their practice. We now have a very rigorous and Common Core–aligned observation rubric that is helping us understand where our teachers are and how we can help them grow and develop.

The district-wide frameworks we’ve implemented are driving instructional improvement and systems alignment. My hope is that the best practices we’re using to pull the right levers at the right time can serve other leaders across the country who are grappling with similar issues.