Teacher Evaluation DNA #1 - What and Why?
We have a brand new approach to teacher evaluations. The new iAspire will be driven by an intelligent teacher evaluation assistant who will help you achieve teacher growth through
A simpler and better process
Embedded and individualized coaching
At the core of our intelligent teacher evaluation assistant is what we’re calling evaluation DNA, or eDNA.
Think of eDNA like your own DNA. Your DNA makes up who you are as a person, including your health predispositions, traits, background, etc. Your eDNA shows you a lot of who you are as a school or organization. It helps you understand what you value, what you measure, and ultimately will help drive personnel decisions and individualized coaching that’s offered to your teachers.
Schools and organizations use a variety of tools and resources to evaluate their teachers. There are multiple frameworks available, including Daniel, Marzano, 5Ds, McRel, and Stronge to name a few. Each model has different areas of focus, different wording, and even different naming structures.
The problem, until now, is there hasn’t been a way to measure the evaluation DNA across schools or organizations. Each organization uses disparate evaluation rubrics, methodologies, and processes, so it’s been really hard to measure teacher effectiveness across organizations. While there is overlap among these models, they are not identical, and these differences means that your data has to live in a silo (which is not very helpful).
The iAspire Intelligent Assistant will learn about your eDNA and offer you and your team suggestions based on your framework, regardless of what your organization has chosen to use.
The iAspire Assistant will even be able to provide to you any hot- or cold-spots based on what you are measuring.
For example, did you know that if you are using the Danielson Framework, you’re probably measuring rigor in your classrooms less than if you used the Marzano framework? However, you will be measuring communication in the classroom much more than those using the Marzano framework (or Stronge or McRel).
Knowing your eDNA will also allow you to benchmark your own performance against all organizations that use iAspire.
Because the iAspire Assistant will learn your eDNA, it will be able to let you know how you compare to other educators across the country and world, even if you’re not using the same framework.
Imagine a world where we could collect teacher performance data across multiple frameworks. Imagine being able to receive auto-suggested comments that align to your own framework. Imagine being able to observe using your own framework and being able to offer your teachers embedded and individualized coaching based on observations.
In the next two blog posts, we will further discuss how knowing your eDNA will help you achieve the results you’re looking for, save you a tremendous amount of time and frustration when observing teachers, and offer embedded and individualized coaching to your teachers.