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The Value of Providing Feedback for Substitutes

With each new school year you work hard to ensure that everyone is ready, from bus drivers to teachers. But we’d like to suggest one more thing to consider: committing to providing feedback to substitute teachers throughout the school year.. You’ll help your substitutes become more effective in the classroom and gain more visibility into your sub pool’s performance across the district.

We’ve written a lot about the value of feedback , particularly as it relates to teachers’ professional growth. But substitutes are often left out of these discussions, even though they’re essential to your district’s operations. Plus, remember the impact they have on student learning: students spend the equivalent of about two-thirds of a school year with substitute teachers over the course of their K-12 journey. That’s a lot of instructional time! So, it’s important to help your substitutes make the most of their time in the classroom by having teachers provide regular, honest feedback.

How to Provide Feedback for Substitute Teachers

Have your teachers get in the habit of documenting substitute performance where possible, and make sure that it’s made available for the substitute to see.

Try not to have substitute feedback communicated over email — you won’t have much visibility as an administrator into which substitutes are doing well and which aren’t. Instead, consider using an electronic system where teachers can provide feedback online. Teachers’ comments will be more consistent across the district, and substitutes will be better informed as to how they can better improve their skills as educators. It’s a good way to engage with substitutes and show that you see them as part of the educational community.

Even more importantly, by managing substitute feedback online, you’ll gain insight into your substitute pool’s effectiveness. For example, you’ll be able to:

  • See which substitutes may benefit from additional support or training
  • See which may not be the right fit for your district.
  • Address any possible issues that may arise, before they become a problem for the district.
  • Identify high-performing substitutes to recognize — whether on social media, at district events or at a Substitute Appreciation Tea.

Regular Substitute Teacher Feedback is Crucial

To get the full picture of substitute effectiveness, regular feedback is crucial. If teachers only leave comments from time to time, you won’t have context as to how substitutes perform on a daily basis. So, encourage teachers to leave feedback for substitutes after every absence. An electronic system like Frontline Absence & Time can automatically remind employees to leave feedback for substitutes, so it doesn’t fall through the cracks.

Make sure that teachers have a set of questions to answer about their experience with the substitute. If you leave it completely open-ended, you won’t have consistent reviews and may not get the information you’re looking for. By default, Frontline’s system asks the following questions, although they can be edited or customized to your heart’s desire:

  • Was classroom work collected?
  • Was the room left as neat and clean as it was found?
  • Was classroom work explained satisfactorily?
  • Did students report that they were treated fairly and consistently?
  • Were any disciplinary issues reported?
  • General notes/comments

By collecting and offering regular feedback, you can help your substitute pool be as effective as possible — which ultimately benefits students. So, make sure that your substitute management plan for the year includes a strategy to collect and act on teacher feedback.

Learn more about how Frontline Absence & Time can support your district.

Evaluating Professional Development for Teachers? Evaluation Questions Are the Linchpin.

Edwards Deming, famous American management consultant, once quipped, “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.”

Evaluation questions form the cornerstone of professional development program evaluation. They both frame and focus the work, pointing us in the right direction for data collection. After all, how would we know what data to collect, and from whom, if we haven’t settled on the questions we’re asking? Crafting the right questions for a particular evaluation project is critical to an effective evaluation effort.

What are evaluation questions?

Think of evaluation questions as research questions. They are broad questions that usually cannot be answered with a simple yes or no, and require collecting and analyzing data to answer. Most importantly, these are not the individual questions we would ask someone on a survey (we’ll get to those in the future!).

Evaluation questions are big picture questions that get at program characteristics and are evaluative. That is, the answers to these questions will help us understand the importance, the quality or the value of our programs.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”O728M” via=”no” ]Well-conceived evaluation questions help us to understand the importance, quality and value of our professional development programs in K-12. [/ctt]

Imagine you are evaluating a professional development program. What do you need to investigate? To answer this, let’s take a quick step back. The previous article in this series showed how to engage stakeholders and generate shared understanding of how our professional learning programs work by creating program descriptions, logic models, and a program theory. Now, we’ll see what you can do with these products to focus your evaluation!

Identifying information needs and decisions

First, consider what you need to know about your professional learning program. This may depend on what decisions you (or others) have to make about it. Do you need to decide whether to continue offering the program? Offer it to an expanded audience or at multiple sites? Eliminate it altogether? Try a different program to address the problem at hand (e.g. improving middle school writing skills)?

Once you’ve identified decisions that need to be made, revisit those three products — program description, logic model and program theory. What are the implicit or explicit assumptions being made about the program? For example, does the program theory state that the professional learning will change teachers’ thinking? Encourage them to use new strategies or resources in their teaching practice? Does the logic model identify certain expected outcomes for students?

Determining the questions

You may be thinking at this point, “Well, we just need to know if our program is working.” To that I would ask, “What do you mean by working?”

“Well,” you might say, “We want to know if the program is effective.” And I would answer with another question: “What do you mean by effective?”

And so it would go until you can define and describe exactly what you are looking for.

Again, revisit your three documents. As you review the program description and program theory, what clues do you have about what it should look like if the program is working or effective? Try to describe this scenario in as much detail as possible. Here’s an example:

If our professional learning program on writing instruction for middle school teachers is working (or effective, or successful…) we would hear teachers saying that they’ve tried the new strategies they learned, and are now using them in their daily practice. They would be able to show us how they are now teaching writing using the new templates. They would be able to show us “before” and “after” examples of student writing, and be able to describe in specific ways how students’ writing has improved.

Once we have defined success, we can turn these ideas into evaluation questions. One of my favorite tricks for doing this is to ask “To what extent…” questions. For the example above, these questions might look like this:

  • To what extent are teachers using the new writing instruction strategies?
  • To what extent are teachers using the writing template?
  • To what extent are teachers able to identify and show specific improvements in students’ writing?

Posing these questions may also inspire some sub-questions:

  • To what extent are teachers using the new writing instruction strategies?
    • How many teachers have tried the strategies at least once?
    • How many teachers are using the strategies twice per week or more often?
  • To what extent are teachers using the writing template?
    • How many teachers are using the writing template at least once per week?
    • To what extent are teachers using the template as given, or modifying it for their classrooms?
  • To what extent are teachers able to identify and show specific improvements in students’ writing?
    • What specific improvements are teachers identifying?
    • To what extent do the improvements we are seeing match the writing deficits we identified when we started the program?

As you can see, your list of evaluation questions can grow quite long! In fact, you may be able to identify dozens of potential evaluation questions. To keep the evaluation feasible, prioritize these and settle on perhaps just 1-2 big questions, especially if each has a couple of sub-questions.

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White Paper: 18,000 Reasons to Rethink Professional Development

Need more inspiration?

Here are generic examples of the types of evaluation questions you may need to ask. Some questions might be formative in nature. That is, they may be used to inform potential changes in the program. Think of these as process questions or implementation questions.

  • Is the program reaching the right people? (In other words, are the people we want to be enrolling in the program doing so?)
  • Is the program being delivered (implemented) as intended?
  • In what ways (if any) does the implementation of the program differ from the program description?

Other questions might be summative in nature. These questions ask about outcomes, impacts or changes that occur that we believe can be attributed to the program.

  • To what extent is the program producing the expected outcomes (i.e., achieving its goals)?
  • How do the effects of the program vary across participants? (i.e., are different teachers experiencing different results?)
  • What evidence do we have that the program is effective in meeting its stated goals and objectives?
  • How can the program be improved?
  • Is the program worth the resources expended (i.e., the costs)?

Using a checklist may be helpful in determining whether your questions are appropriate and will be effective.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”AwUf5″ via=”no” ]It’s critical to craft the right questions when evaluating #professionaldevelopment for teachers. [/ctt]

Evaluation questions lead to data collection

As we have learned previously, we can conceive of program evaluation as occurring in five phases: Engagement and Understanding, Evaluation Questions, Data Collection, Data Analysis and Interpretation, and Reporting and Use.

As you can see from the above examples, evaluation questions point us to where and from whom to collect data. If our question is, “To what extent are teachers using the new resources?” then we know we need to collect data from teachers. If our question is, “Are students’ writing skills improving?” we know we will likely need student work samples as evidence.

In each case, we will have to determine the feasibility of using different data collection strategies such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations or artifact reviews (e.g., looking at lesson plans or student work samples). Each of these strategies features a set of distinct advantages and disadvantages and requires different resources.

Next Up In the Series:

In Part 5, we dive deeper into Data Collection.

Micro-Credentials — Frequently Asked Questions

MICRO-CREDENTIALS HELP YOU FOCUS PROFESSIONAL LEARNING ON OUTCOMES

 

There’s nothing wrong with mandating a certain amount of professional learning for teachers throughout the year. But when meeting a minimum hourly requirement becomes the goal in itself, rather than the means to improving practice, the effectiveness of PD plummets.

That’s why it’s so important to focus on impact and outcomes, not punching a clock. That can be a bit of a holy grail: easy to talk about, difficult to achieve. And that’s one reason micro-credentials are growing in popularity in schools and districts.

Micro-credentials are an effective way for leaders to be sure their educators have the skills needed to be successful in the classroom. They’re also a great way for educators to be recognized for the skills they possess or develop through professional learning.

Q: What impact do micro-credentials have on professional learning?

Micro-credentials make the professional learning experience far more effective. They do this by:

  • Requiring job-embedded evidence to earn the micro-credential, so you know the educator can apply the skills they’ve learned in the classroom.
  • Allowing educators to focus on developing the skills they lack, without spending a lot of time on the skills they already have.

Some professional development systems that offer micro-credentials also enable a collaborative-based approach to assessment, which allows you to leverage the strength of experts in your district.

You may enjoy this hand-picked content:

It’s All About the Outcome: Unraveling the confusion around micro-credentials.”  

Q: How do micro-credentials meet teachers’ needs?

While the need to develop skills and demonstrate competency has not dwindled, traditional ways of delivering and measuring professional development are becoming obsolete. In fact, 71% of teachers aren’t satisfied with their current PD offerings[i] and only 40% feel that PD activities are a good use of their time.[ii]

Every teacher has unique skills and areas for growth — so why should professional learning be one-size-fits-all? And among other criteria, the Every Student Succeeds Act calls for professional learning to be sustained, intensive and classroom-focused. In other words, the need is for professional development that reaches individual teachers right where they are — and equips them to make genuine strides in their classroom practice.

Micro-credentials provide exactly that. They allow learners to progress through their PD goals as they demonstrate mastery of skills — regardless of time, pace or place of learning.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”6ddbw” via=”no” ]Micro-credentials allow learners to progress through their PD goals as they demonstrate mastery of skills, regardless of time, pace or place of learning.[/ctt]

Q: Why should we use micro-credentials as part of our professional development strategy?

Glad you asked! Depending on the system you’re using, there are several advantages micro-credentials offer:

  • Take a growth-based approach. Micro-credentials redefine the professional learning experience, shifting the emphasis from seat time to demonstrated competence.
  • Support development around targeted needs. Allow instructional leaders to recommend micro-credentials that match an educator’s specific growth goals.
  • Provide ongoing feedback. Educators can submit pieces of required evidence — one at a time — enabling district-assigned assessors to provide incremental feedback.
  • Enhance all your PD resources. Micro-credentials have the potential to make all the PD tools and resources your educators access — from virtual PLCs to online tools to coaches and mentors — more relevant and meaningful.
Micro-credentials in Frontline Professional Growth make the professional learning experience far more effective. They clearly show what an educator needs to know to complete the micro-credential; how they can develop the skill and if they need more knowledge or training; and how they can demonstrate skill mastery and apply it in a classroom or other professional setting. Check them out.

[i]Teachers Know Best: Teachers’ View on Professional Development. (Boston Consulting Group and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, December 2014). https://s3.amazonaws.com/edtech-production/reports/Gates-PDMarketResearch-Dec5.pdf

[ii]The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development. (The New Teacher Project, August 2015). http://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP-Mirage_2015.pdf

3 Trends to Know When Recruiting New Teachers

Every time a position opens up in your district, whether from attrition or increased student enrollment, you need to find a qualified, talented candidate to fill the role. It’s easy to get into reaction mode, where you go from filling one position onto the next, but part of strategic recruitment is looking ahead and planning accordingly.

So, what trends should you be aware of in K-12 recruiting and hiring? We looked at data from Frontline Recruiting & Hiring, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center of Education Statistics to put together a comprehensive picture of what’s on the horizon.

The numbers don’t lie — there really is a teacher shortage, and it’s bound to only get worse.

The applicant pool is relatively inexperienced.

First up: an insight from the Frontline Research & Learning Institute. One-third of the national applicant pool consists of new teachers with fewer than three years of experience.

hiring trends for recruiting new teachers pie chart

Less-experienced teachers may make up the bulk of your applicant list, and it’s important to have a way to highlight those with great potential, even if they don’t have years of teaching to back it up. And once they’re hired, you’ll want to have robust mentoring and professional development programs ready to help newer teachers hone their instructional skills.

Not only are many teaching candidates relatively inexperienced, they’re also fairly mobile. This is good news when recruiting (there’s a larger pool of job-seekers) but can be a challenge when it comes to your own district’s retention rate. New graduates don’t seem to be staying in one place for long.

Most states are seeing decreased enrollment in teacher prep programs — but not all.

If applicant pools are comprised in large part by newer educators, the logical next step is to look at the pipeline of new teachers set to enter the workforce in the next several years. Nationally, there’s certainly a shortage of teachers that’s bound to get worse. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of new teachers coming out of teacher preparation programs fell by 65% from 2009 to 2015.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”pA62H” via=”no” ]New teachers coming out of teacher prep programs down by 65%, according to DOE. #K12 #teachershortage[/ctt]

But what’s happening on a national level isn’t always reflective of what’s going in your own state, as demonstrated by the map below, which tracks changes in the number of educators completing teacher preparation programs by state.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, 2016 Title II Reports: National Teacher Preparation Data. https://title2.ed.gov/

Six states have defied the national decrease in the number of new teachers: Massachusetts, North Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Arizona and West Virginia. Of those, only Arizona and Utah continue to see increased enrollment in teacher preparation programs, suggesting that they will continue to produce more educators. And although New Hampshire, Washington and Vermont have had fewer teachers graduating from teacher prep programs, enrollment has recently ticked upward — so hopefully, those states will see an influx of new educators within the next couple of years.

New education graduates tend to be from large public universities in the West, or smaller private colleges in the East.

Finally, there are a few geographic trends when it comes to the most prolific teacher preparation programs.

Source: National Center for Education Statistics. IPEDS: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds

There are far more programs east of the Mississippi River, with many educators coming from many smaller colleges. Meanwhile, the West tends to see a large number of new teachers from a relatively limited number of universities.

We also see a surprisingly large number of education degrees conferred by online programs headquartered in western states, such as Ashford University (California) and Western Governors (Utah). Note that these programs’ students are likely located across the country, even though their degree is recorded under the institution’s home state.

So, what does this mean for the school district administrator? If you recruit out-of-state, consider tailoring your recruitment strategy to target some of the larger universities, even if they aren’t nearby. Consider attending a job fair in the area, if you’re up for a road trip. Just make sure to bring plenty of recruitment materials that show why your town or city is a wonderful place to live.

If you’re not up for a road trip, or travel expenses aren’t in the budget, it may be worth reaching out to large universities’ career services or schools of education to ask if they’d spread the word about open positions in your district.

Looking for more insights into the new teacher pipeline? We’ve got you covered. See more trends and data here.

3 Surprising Ways to Engage Stakeholders in Evaluating Professional Development (and Ensuring a Quality Evaluation!)

At Greece Central School District in Rochester, NY, we hired certified trainers to facilitate the 8-day Cognitive Coaching® seminar for all of our teacher leaders. We followed up with monthly collegial circle meetings for them to reflect on their learning, share how coaching sessions were going and practice scenarios with one another to refine their skills. We invited the trainers back for yearly refresher sessions. This program was designed to influence changes in teacher practice and ultimately impact student learning.

But, ask each of our teacher leaders to describe what changes in practice might look like and how coaching would impact student learning, and you’ll get almost as many answers as participants.

How do we evaluate a professional learning program if everyone has a different idea of what the program does, who it serves or what success looks like? How might we generate the right questions to ask, identify appropriate expected outcomes and determine what to measure?

Part of evaluating a program is understanding the program and what we expect it to do. And part of a successful evaluation effort is getting stakeholders — teacher participants, principals, district office administrators, Board of Education members, etc. — on board to support the work.

In my previous article, I outlined five phases of program evaluation with the first being engagement and understanding. Here, I’ll describe three evaluation-related practices:

  1. developing a program description,
  2. creating a logic model, and
  3. articulating a program theory.

These can be used to engage stakeholders, build a common understanding of professional learning programs and set up for a successful program evaluation.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”I67mB” via=”no” ]3 key practices in evaluating #ProfessionalLearning: 1) develop a program description, 2) create a logic model, and 3) articulate a program theory.[/ctt]

Why spend time on crafting these elements? There’s nothing worse in program evaluation than collecting and analyzing data only to realize that the results aren’t useful. They don’t help you answer questions, or inform decisions you have to make about the program. Let’s take a look at these three elements, and how they lay the foundation for successful program evaluation.

Program Description

Why is a program description so important to program evaluation? A program description promotes clarity and contributes to a shared and comprehensive understanding of what the program is, who it is intended to reach and what it expects to accomplish.

A thorough description also identifies why the program was developed. What is the need or problem the program addresses? It’s worth gathering a group of key people to craft a few brief paragraphs to answer these questions, even when the program has been developed by someone else.

It’s OK if your description isn’t the same as another district might come up with. For example, maybe your district held the Cognitive Coaching® seminar for administrators, not teachers, and for a different reason than my district did. Our descriptions of need, target audiences and expected outcomes will look different, even when the program itself may be delivered identically in both places.

Logic Model

A logic model is a graphic representation — a concept map of sorts — of a program’s inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes.

  • Inputs are what we need to run the program. What resources do we need? Funding for professional learning facilitators, curriculum materials, space to hold courses?
  • What activities comprise the program? Workshop sessions, follow-up coaching, action research and examination of student work are just a few of the possible professional learning formats.
  • Outputs are produced by the program activities – that is, the number of sessions held, the number of participants who attended, products such as action research findings, lesson or unit plans, or other curricular resources that were developed. Outputs are generally easy to report, but don’t speak to the quality or effectiveness of the program.
  • Outcomes describe the expected changes in program participants. With professional learning, we may expect that teachers learn and apply new content, use new resources or instructional strategies, or change their teaching practice. And of course, expected outcomes may include increases in student achievement (or other student-related metrics such as discipline or attendance) as a result of teacher learning and change in practice.

Logic_Model

Outputs and outcomes are easily confused. Just remember that outputs are program data, and outcomes are people data! The Tearless Logic Model describes an interactive, collaborative (even fun!) process for creating a logic model that is certain to appeal to educators.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”gc7Cv” via=”no” ]In professional learning, it’s easy to confuse outputs and outcomes. Outputs are program data. Outcomes are people data.[/ctt]

Program Theory

When we create professional learning programs, purchase professional learning curriculum or hire consultants to facilitate learning, we think we have high quality professional development, but how do we really know? Programs may meet certain characteristics that make them likely to be high quality (e.g., ongoing, job-embedded, data-driven). But how can we connect the dots between what the teachers are learning and how their students will benefit?

Recently, I led a collegial book study on Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond. We had teachers read the chapters and participate in online discussions. But how did we expect that teachers reading a book and writing about their thoughts would lead to improvement for students?

This is where program theory comes in. Program theory describes how the program is supposed to work. Some might call this “theory of change.” The program theory blends elements from the program description and information outlined in the logic model. Most importantly, a program theory articulates the linkages among the components of the logic model.

A key reflective question for articulating a program theory is this: What makes us think that this program, the way it is designed, and these particular program activities will lead to those expected outcomes we identified? A simple program theory for my book study might start like this:

  • If teachers read, reflect on and discuss with colleagues the material in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, they will deepen their understanding of culturally responsive teaching (CRT).
  • If teachers deepen their understanding of CRT, they will begin to think about how it connects to other work we do in the district around equity and social emotional learning.
  • If teachers deepen their understanding of CRT, they will also begin to recognize the cultural capital and capabilities students bring to the classroom, and will be able to use these tools to create engaging instruction.
  • If teachers learn about implicit bias, they will develop an awareness of how it can be a barrier to positive student-teacher relationships.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”60PLz” via=”no” ]Reflection question when evaluating PD: Why do we believe that a professional learning program will lead to a given set of expected outcomes?[/ctt]

A few bullet points later, we might articulate how teachers will change their practice, and eventually, there will be a connection to the specific areas of student learning and achievement we want to improve.

The idea is that we’re identifying how we expect our professional learning programs to work. Once we do this, we can identify where we want to ask questions for the evaluation. Do we want to know if teachers are in fact, deepening their learning? Or do we want to investigate whether teacher learning is resulting in change in practice? A program theory helps us to know where to look and what to look for in a program evaluation.

Creating a program description, developing a logic model and articulating a program theory need not take a great deal of time. The investment, however, is sure to result in more clarity around our professional learning programs and shared understandings of how our professional learning programs are expected to produce results. They lay the foundation for us to identify relevant evaluation questions and set us up to collect the right data for our program evaluation.

Next Up In the Series:

In Part 4, we’ll learn about evaluation questions and how they point directly to the data we need to inform key decisions about professional learning.

The Truth Is… We Could Not Run Our Schools Without Our Substitutes

On any given Friday in May, my school district is struggling to fill our substitute vacancies. Many of our highly regarded substitutes are retired teachers, and by May they have worked all of the days that our state’s retirement system will allow. In addition, May brings college graduations and weddings and, well, a wide array of reasons for our teachers to be absent from work. And yet… learning must continue.

Thus, we find ourselves using creative solutions to plug those holes. A substitute may arrive at one school to step in for a third grade teacher, only to be told that we’ve covered that vacancy another way, and that he/she is instead needed at another school across town. Or, a substitute may come to a middle school teaching assignment expecting to have planning time as part of the day (definitely not guaranteed for substitutes, but a nice perk!), and will instead be told that he/she will be covering other classes during that time.

When we ask our substitutes to do more and more, I’m glad that we have a few constructs in place to thank them for their commitment to our district:

A Loyalty Rate for Loyal Substitutes

Like many districts, we have different pay rates — a daily rate, an increased rate for those who have worked a certain number of days, and a long-term rate. A couple of years ago, we also added a Loyalty Rate to honor those who have, indeed, shown loyalty to our school district.

In order to be eligible for this rate, a substitute must meet these qualifications:

  • Have worked in our district for at least 5 years as a substitute and/or in a full-time position.
  • Have worked on at least 90 days as a substitute in our school district in the previous year.

The Loyalty Rate resets each fall, and thus each spring we review our data to identify which substitutes qualify for the rate in the next school year. Full disclosure: the Loyalty Rate is only $3.00 per day more than the rate used for those who have worked at least 60 days. However, we know that our substitutes may also work in surrounding districts, and we created this rate to both encourage them to keep our district at the top of their list, and to acknowledge their consistent work and longevity with our district.

Substitute Appreciation Tea

Each June, we host a Substitute Appreciation Tea. We schedule it during the window between the school year ending and summer school starting so that as many substitutes as possible might be available. We work with our food service provider to create a real tea, complete with finger sandwiches, pastries, lemonade, and of course, tea!

The agenda is simple:

  • Very brief speeches from a couple of grateful administrators.
  • Time to mingle (many of our substitutes have known each other for years, and love the chance to catch up).
  • An opportunity for substitutes to provide feedback to us via a brief form which they complete in small groups.

Our Tea gives us the chance to let our substitutes know how much we really appreciate them while also getting feedback from them in a positive setting.

A few photos from our last Substitute Appreciation Tea:

tea pot for substitute appreciation tea eventSnacks for substitute teacher appreciation teaSeated for substitute appreciation tea event

Substitute Teacher Training

We are proud of the training that we provide to our substitutes and believe that putting time and effort into offering our substitutes training shows them that we appreciate and value the work that they do for us. We make it very clear to them that every day counts for our students, that gone are the days when a teacher might have the substitute put on a movie for the students. Our substitutes need to be ready to teach new skills and reinforce what has already been taught, and thus our school district helps them to hone their craft.

All of our substitutes are required to attend a half-day training prior to working for us. Even if they have worked in this role in other places, we want to make sure that they have full awareness of the expectations in our district. We try to keep our training interactive and fun while we provide important information.

During this training, we cover:

  • HR basics such as securing assignments and understanding pay structure
  • Information about our district
  • Crisis plans and health training (such as practice with EPI Pens)
  • Classroom management expectations and tips

In addition, we offer our substitutes optional training opportunities throughout the year. We take advantage of times when we know our substitutes would not be working for us, such as after school or during School Improvement Days when students are not in attendance, and then provide in-services run by our specialists. For example, training about working with students who receive special education services was provided by our Director of Student Services, and updated information about math instruction was given by our Math Coordinator. In this way, we help our substitutes to remain current in their teaching practices, and we honor their work as educators who are important to our system.

Of course, the best appreciation comes at the school level. I will never forget the joy and pride I felt when teachers told me that they had created goodie bags for all of the substitutes who were present at their school on a particular day. I also regularly remind our principals and building secretaries to greet and thank substitutes, and to treat them as the professionals that they are.

The truth is, we could not run our schools without our substitutes. It seems only right that we let them know that.

This post also appears on the author’s blog.

8 Tips on Listening for the Truth in Reference Calls

The reference call – it’s often the final check in a lengthy process of searching for the best educator to hire for the school district. These calls can either confirm the hiring of a great candidate – or prevent a terrible decision. However, to make the most of reference calls, administrators and hiring managers have to know how to listen for the truth.

Lynn Glickman, the Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources at Community Consolidated School District 21 in Wheeling, Illinois, has learned a few things in her years of hiring and both making and participating in reference calls. Get her eight tips for listening for the truth.

This post originally appeared on Dr. Lynn Glickman’s blog: Reference Calls — Listen for the Truth (8 Tips).

I was a newer principal, and I had recently dismissed a pre-tenured teacher. She wasn’t terrible, just not good enough for my students. I had written her a reference letter, the kind you write for just this type of situation — strengths, as everyone has them, with lots of holes that I hoped other interviewing administrators would find. Then I took a call from a principal in a nearby district. We knew each other by association, but that’s all. He was eager to hire her, and this call was his final stop. I answered his questions and thought to myself, “I hope he listened carefully, and realized that I wasn’t really recommending her.”

Years later, this principal and I landed together in a new district. Early in our professional relationship, he told me, “You know, I had to let that teacher go after one year. I couldn’t believe you had recommended her to me — I was always so annoyed about that!”

“What?” I said. “I didn’t recommend her! I was trying to tell you not to hire her!” It was a perfect example of what happens over and over again. He was listening only to confirm his decision to hire her, and I was being positive, hoping he could read my mind.

I share this story often in my current role as Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources. Administrators (and hiring executives in other organizations, I am sure) work diligently to find the very best person for their opening. They carefully comb through applications and resumes, conduct screening interviews, 1:1 interviews and often team interviews. By the time they get to the reference checks — well, that’s what they are often doing — checking a box. This is the last step in the process of finding the Perfect Person. They are already sold on the candidate, and if they brought in a team to interview, so is the team! Who wants bad news at this point? And so, like my principal friend from many years ago, they miss what a reference might be trying to convey in an oh-so-indirect way.

Hiring is one of our most important administrative tasks, particularly when hiring teachers and principals. This is the time when we really need to get it right, because getting it wrong can make for a very, very bad year. (And depending on a whole bunch of variables, one mistake can be prolonged for much longer than a year.)

So, how do we get it right? Here are a few tips:

  1. Before starting to make reference calls, promise yourself that you will be open to hearing bad news. Honestly, that’s what is most important. In fact, when I interview with a team, I always talk about how important reference calls are, and let team members know that sometimes we have to go another way after we’ve made those calls.

    Experienced interview teams know that the person who came to the interview is not always the person who “shows up” at work, even if it is the same person! When I remind my team of that, they are understanding if we end up going with our #2 choice, or even if we have to interview more candidates.

  2. Try to establish rapport with your reference at the start of the call. Yes, everyone is busy, but find a way to connect with the reference as a person. It will be harder for your reference to evade your questions or straight out lie to you if he/she likes you on the phone — even a little bit!

  3. Do you have flexibility with your questions? If so, make sure to ask, “Would you re-hire this person?” Or, if you are speaking with a colleague, you may get useful information asking, “Why do you think this person would be interested in coming to a new school/district/organization?” If the first answer you get seems bogus, find a way to dig a little.

  4. Even if you have to use a standard set of questions, surely you can ask follow-ups. When I sense that someone is choosing words very carefully, or is trying to brush past a question with a pat answer, I may ask, “Can you tell me more about that?” Often, they will.

  5. Pay attention to the reference’s tone of voice and listen for pauses. Your reference may be trying to figure out how to answer a question in a way that is semi-truthful without hurting the person’s chances for getting the job. This is the perfect place for those follow-up questions.

  6. What about those references who ask you to simply email them the questions, and they’ll email you the answers? Yes, they might just be really busy, but they might be trying to control the situation by carefully wording their answers.

    You can’t see pauses in an email, you can’t hear tone of voice and asking follow-up questions is then even more time-consuming.

    I try very hard to get people to talk to me on the phone. When they won’t, I don’t necessarily decide that there is a problem with the candidate, but I don’t put much stock in that particular reference.

  7. Think carefully about who you are calling. For the most part, avoid calling your candidates’ colleagues, or only do so if you are also calling a supervisor or two.

    A teacher’s teammate is rarely going to tell you that his/her colleague had classroom management problems or didn’t communicate well with parents, and an administrator’s lateral coworker is unlikely to tell you that projects were not finished on time.

    I won’t hire anyone without speaking with his/her current supervisor, although certainly I will agree to make that call last, after I’m satisfied with the results of other calls. Also, you may be able to glean quite a lot of information from a supervisor from 2-3 years ago. Sometimes, the supervisor won’t remember much — but sometimes he/she will remember a lot, and will be ready to talk when no longer in regular contact with the candidate.

  8. Finally, use your resources. The best reference call is with someone you know. Even if you don’t know any of your candidate’s references, someone else who is part of the hiring process might! If so, hand that call over to your colleague to get the most truthful information.

I still enjoy a friendship with that principal colleague who hired that marginal teacher. We still talk about this. We both learned. We are both still learning.

10 Best Practices for Improving and Expanding Social, Emotional and Behavioral Supports

While there is much debate about why an increasing number of children come to school with significant social, emotional and behavioral (S, E & B) needs, nearly all districts report the number of children with these challenges is on the rise.

In order for students to meet developmental milestones, learn, grow and lead productive lives, it is critical that their social, emotional and behavioral issues be addressed. Research indicates that children and youth with mental health problems have lower educational achievement and greater involvement with the criminal justice system [1]. Improving and expanding S, E & B supports not only helps the students who have these challenges but can benefit nearly every student and adult in a school.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”4S5P3″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]75% to 80% of children and youth in need of mental health services do not receive them.[/ctt]

All schools — urban, suburban and rural; large and small; and regardless of socioeconomics — have students with social, emotional and behavioral challenges. However, in some of these communities, students receive the counseling they need, classroom routines promote positive behavior, and most strikingly, students with problematic behavior are able to stay in class and seldom disrupt their peers. What is the difference between these schools and typical schools? The distinctions can be hard to notice because the difference isn’t in the amount they spend, the programs they bought, or the dedication of their staff. The people, tools and talents themselves aren’t all that different but the way in which staff work and deliver intervention is different — the more effective districts have created a coherent, collaborative plan grounded in a systems-thinking approach and incorporating best practices.

Here, we focus on 10 key, interconnected best practices to help you and your team effectively and comprehensively create a system to meet the social, emotional and behavioral needs of students. These practices fall into three major categories: Leveraging the talents of current staff, focusing on prevention and supporting local partnerships.

Leverage the Talents of Current Staff

1. Streamline meetings and paperwork to increase the time staff can spend with students.

Process mapping, reviewing who attends which meetings and setting guidelines for desired time with students can often significantly increase the services provided to students by current staff.

2. Allow staff to play to their strengths; assign roles based on strengths, not titles.

Identify staff’s unique skills and match job responsibilities to these areas of expertise. For example, some psychologists may have expertise in behavior management while others may have expertise in assessment and case management.

3. Facilitate teamwork with common planning time.

A wide array of people in a variety of roles are often involved in supporting the social, emotional and behavioral needs of students. Allow them to come together weekly to review student progress and adjust support strategies.

4. Support classroom teachers with in-the-classroom support from staff skilled in behavior management.

In-the-moment coaching, in-the-classroom observations and specific recommendations from behavior specialists can help classroom teachers meet the needs of their students.

Focus on Prevention

5. Focus on prevention by identifying and managing behavioral triggers.

Identify why a student acts out and develop specific strategies for averting these triggers to prevent outbursts before they happen.

6. Increase access to staff with expertise in behavior management.

To effectively focus on prevention, schools need access to experts trained in identifying and reducing behavioral triggers. Given tight budgets, seek to hire staff with expertise in behavior management when doing replacement hiring and/or seek to build a centralized behavior team that can provide support across many schools.

7. Align discipline policies to support a commitment to prevention.

It is important that the discipline code has the flexibility to support a focus on prevention, that loss of learning time is minimized, that suspensions are avoided for nonviolent infractions and that unconscious bias is mitigated.

8. Stay focused on academic achievement.

Many “behavior programs” seem to undervalue the importance of academic learning and student achievement. Core content is often taught by special education teachers instead of subject expert teachers, and curriculum is sometimes watered down; lowered expectations can exacerbate troubling behaviors.

Support Local Partnerships

9. Seek local partnerships.

Often, local mental health agencies, nearby nonprofit counseling services, universities and sometimes even for-profit practitioners can provide social and emotional services at little or no out-of-pocket costs to students or the district.

10. Actively support local partnerships.

Local partners can provide much-needed services, so it is worth making an investment in managing and facilitating these relationships to ensure their success.

Working Together to Improve Your School’s Behavioral Climate

With social, emotional and behavioral issues posing a growing challenge for schools, and with budgets tight for the foreseeable future, schools will need a new and comprehensive approach to meet the needs of students. While neither easy nor quick, these best practices can help to better serve students. This work, however, will need leadership from the top, systems thinking, support for teachers and principals and perseverance. If parents, staff, school leadership and district leaders work and plan together, much progress can be made in addressing this difficult challenge.

Read the full District Management Journal article “10 Best Practices for Improving and Expanding Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Supports.” 

1 “Children’s Mental Health: Facts for Policymakers,” National Center for Children in Poverty, November 2006, http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_687.html

What’s Involved in Evaluating a Professional Development Program?

Today’s article, focused on the five phases of program evaluation, is Part 2 of a seven-part series on evaluating professional development. In the rest of the series, you’ll learn how you can apply these phases to evaluate your own programs.

 

What is Program Evaluation?

In Part 1, we learned that program evaluation is applying systematic methods to collect, analyze, interpret and communicate data about a program to understand its design, implementation, outcomes, or impacts. In the field, evaluators talk about evaluation as a way to determine the merit, worth and significance of a program. Simply put, it’s about understanding the quality of our professional learning programs, how valuable they are to our schools or districts and how important they are to what we are trying to accomplish with teachers and students.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”5Xvam” via=”no” ]PD program evaluation: using data to understand the quality of our programs, value to our schools and importance to our goals.[/ctt]

 

Program Evaluation Has 5 Key Phases

Evaluating a program consists of five interdependent phases that don’t necessarily occur in a perfectly linear fashion.

Program_Evaluation

Phase 1: Engagement and Understanding

Program evaluation is most successful when stakeholders are involved and work collaboratively. Who should be involved? Administrators and teachers connected to the program, along with instructors and participants, will likely be called upon to offer or collect data, and should be included in planning the evaluation.

Think of a professional learning program in your school or district. Is there a clearly articulated description of the program? Are there stated and measurable outcomes? Does everyone involved with the program know what participants are expected to learn, how they might change their practice, and what student outcomes are expected as a result? Does everyone agree on these? Don’t worry! It’s quite common to answer “no” to one or all of these questions.

In a future post, you will learn about the importance of program descriptions and logic models. I’ll share how these tools can be easily created to promote shared understanding of our professional learning programs and how this sets us up to conduct high quality evaluation.

Phase 2: Questions

Developing evaluation questions is foundational to effective program evaluation. Evaluation questions form the basis for the evaluation plan and drive data collection.

Conducting evaluation is much like conducting a research study. Every research study starts with one or a few broad questions to investigate. These questions inform how and from whom we collect data. The following are examples of the types of questions we might pursue in evaluating our professional learning programs:

  • To what extent is the program changing teacher practice?
  • What evidence do we have (if any) of student learning that may be attributable to the program?
  • How might the program be improved?

Phase 3: Data Collection

We collect data on professional learning programs to answer our evaluation questions, and all decisions about data collection strategies to use rest squarely on these.

  • Most people are familiar with surveys (also called questionnaires; check out my book on designing surveys), interviews, or focus group interviews, but data collection can go far beyond asking people questions.
  • Observations of a professional learning program in action can yield important insights into how the program is going and whether or not it appears to be on track to achieving its objectives.
  • Classroom observations can help us understand if and how well teachers are implementing new practices, whether there are barriers to implementation, and what might be getting in the way.
  • Teachers journaling about their learning, or creating lesson plans or other artifacts, can also demonstrate whether a professional learning program is working well.
  • And of course, student data — achievement, attendance, discipline, work samples, etc. — can also serve to help answer the evaluation questions.

Later on in this series we’ll offer a more in-depth look at the advantages and disadvantages of specific data collection strategies, along with ideas for exploring more innovative data sources.

Phase 4: Data Analysis

This is the phase that scares people the most. People often think they need to understand statistics or have advanced spreadsheet skills to do data analysis. They worry when their datasets aren’t perfect or whether they have collected data in a “scientific” enough way. They are concerned about whether their data is reliable and valid, especially if it is qualitative and perceptual data, such as answers to open-ended questions from surveys or interviews.

[ctt template=”9″ link=”jXp38″ via=”no” ]You don’t need a Ph.D. in statistics to understand and analyze data around your professional learning program. [/ctt]

These concerns are understandable, but in truth, there’s no need to get worked up.  In a future post, we will put to rest all of these fears!

Given the types of data we use to evaluate professional learning programs, we rarely need statistics beyond simple frequencies and averages. And datasets are seldom perfect. When we conduct surveys, for example, we find that some people don’t answer some questions. Others misinterpret questions, or it’s clear they make mistakes answering them.

On one feedback form after a very well-received workshop, a participant checked “Strongly disagree” for every statement when it was clear that “strongly agree” was the intended answer. How did I know this? Between the statements were comment boxes filled with glowing praise about how much the participant enjoyed the workshop, valued the materials and loved the instructor. It was clear the person mistook “Strongly disagree” for “Strongly agree” based on the location of those responses on the sheet.

Phase 5: Reporting and Use

Evaluation should be conducted with an emphasis on use. Once we interpret the data and glean insights that can inform future decisions about a program, we need to consider how to report new learning to key stakeholders. The formula for effective reporting includes:

  • identifying appropriate audiences for evaluation reports,
  • understanding their information needs, and
  • knowing how they consume information.

Are you reporting to a Board of Education? A superintendent? A group of administrators and teachers? Do they need all the details, just a few key data points, or a brief summary of results? Knowing our audience and how to engage them informs how we create reports, and reports can come in a wide variety of formats. Here are just a few examples:

  • Presentations
  • Documents
  • Infographics
  • Podcasts
  • Webpages

Evaluation as an Iterative Process

Earlier, I mentioned that these phases aren’t necessarily linear. In the graphic, you see them as a cycle where Reporting and Use points back to Engagement and Understanding. As we complete an evaluation for a program and make decisions about its future, we may enter another evaluation cycle. Also, as we collect data, we may analyze and report on it even as the evaluation work continues, thus revisiting Phases 3, 4 and 5 multiple times in one evaluation cycle.

Next up in the series

In Part 3, we go deep into ensuring that everyone has a shared understanding of how our professional learning programs are designed to influence change in teaching practice and student learning.

Professional Development for Principals

How Franklin Public Schools Used In-District Expertise to Promote Effective Observations

 

When you talk about employee evaluations in K-12, the first thing most people think is “teachers.” That’s true at Franklin Public Schools in Wisconsin, too. But as they work to build the capacity of teachers in the district, they also place a strong emphasis on developing principals — especially on equipping them to be strong instructional leaders.

This spring, we spoke with Christopher Reuter, Director of Teaching & Learning, and Erin King, principal at Forest Park Middle School, to find out what that looks like.

Here’s what Chris said about the role of the principal:

“I think the principalship, at least in the state of Wisconsin right now, is the hardest job in public education. You’re pulled in every direction. You open up any newspaper, go to any website or social media, and you see the many things that happen daily in our schools. It’s the principal who has to carry that load, as well as connect the ever-moving parts together to make sure that everyone’s moving forward.”

Christopher Reuter, Director of Teaching & Learning, Forest Park Middle School

[ctt template=”9″ link=”qVdhU” via=”no” ]It’s the principal who has to connect the ever-moving parts together to make sure everyone’s moving forward. – @chris_reuter [/ctt]

Erin has put a lot of work and thought into the kinds of feedback she provides her teachers. For starters, she said it needs to be provided soon after the observation:

“I had a big ‘aha’ moment during my own observation cycle that I wasn’t providing [teachers] timely feedback. I was trying to have everything look perfect, have it all done, tied up in a bow with my feedback entered into it, and I was waiting too long to have those conversations with teachers and focused too much on that one observation period versus instructional practice overall.”

Erin King, Principal, Forest Park Middle School

How does she make sure those are more than just one-way conversations? How does she build trust?

“I ask [teachers] for feedback, and I’m very honest. I put my cards on the table, and my staff has seen that who I am is who I am every day. They see that honesty, and that transparency and vulnerability….They see that I am learning and growing as well, which has been part of the feedback teachers have given me: that they really appreciate that they see that I’m learning, and that I’m growing, and that I’m dedicated to that process, which is very similar to the process that they’re going through.”

Erin King, Principal, Forest Park Middle School

Chris asked Erin if she’d be willing to conduct a post-observation conversation with a teacher in a fishbowl setting for other principals to observe.

“As administrators we don’t see each other engage in post-observation conversations, so we assume that we’re probably all doing it in the same way. I was told that I’m not necessarily doing it in the same way as others. Chris approached me to see if I’d be willing to model a post-observation conversation in front of other administrators.”

I approached a teacher that is a real growth-mindsetted professional and asked her if she would be willing to put herself out there, be vulnerable with me and model a post-observation conversation. [The day after her classroom observation] we engaged in the post-observation in front of all the other principals, directors and superintendent within the district.

We were in the middle of the room with tables around us in a U-shape, but I think that that the most important thing was that I had a document camera displaying my notes from our pre-observation conversation, and then the notes that I took along the way….The other principals were asking, ‘How did you circle to this feedback? Did you know what you wanted her to learn and where it was going to end?’”

Erin King, Principal, Forest Park Middle School

[ctt template=”9″ link=”5ukIW” via=”no” ]“As administrators we don’t see each other engage in post-observation conversations, so we assume that we’re probably all doing it in the same way.” – @erinkking [/ctt]

Since then, Chris and the other directors at the district have continued to observe principals as they conduct these conversations.

“It’s caught on. Look at the work that Erin has done over the last year, and how that has developed her and the feedback she’s received. I and two other directors have all observed at least two or three principals in the venue and provided feedback.

We as a director team meet every Monday, and one of our standing agenda items is to calibrate around our observation of principals and share what we saw, talking about the post-observation conversation. We’re trying to model and do what Erin does with her teachers, with our principals as well — whether it be one-on-one or in small groups.”

Christopher Reuter, Director of Teaching & Learning, Forest Park Middle School

Chris and Erin both emphasized that these open conversations, rooted in trust between principals and teachers, or directors and principals, are vital to their growth efforts — and ultimately, to student achievement.

You can listen to the entire interview above, or — better yet! — subscribe to Field Trip and get new episodes every other Friday.

You may enjoy this hand-picked content:

White Paper: “Feedback That Matters: Using formative feedback and meaningful conversations to grow teaching practice and foster a collaborative educational environment.”

RTI/MTSS and End of School Year: 7 Tips to Reflect and Recalibrate

School leaders who implement RTI/MTSS have a big responsibility ― to deploy a school’s full array of intervention resources to find and help struggling students. To meet this goal, periodic checkups are needed to ensure that schools align their current practices with RTI/MTSS best practices. The close of the school year offers staff the ideal time for an RTI/MTSS checkup ― now is your chance to tidy up loose ends in record-keeping, use data to improve classroom instruction, identify gaps between intended and actual service delivery and look ahead to the next phase in RTI/MTSS program roll-out.

As summer approaches, here are 7 steps to firm up your procedures, ensure they are carried out with integrity and prepare staff for the 2018-19 school year.

Steps to Making the Most of Spring RTI/MTSS Data

1. Archive RTI/MTSS information

Schools should remind all staff responsible for keeping track of RTI/MTSS information that they should complete their records for the current school year before summer break. Staff should also be given a deadline date for finishing record entries. Having a district or school-wide RTI/MTSS program management system that all stakeholders can access helps keep data organized and archived for future use. Once that deadline is past, school staff can spot-check student entries in the RTI/MTSS system to verify that records are indeed complete.

2. Evaluate Effectiveness of Core Instruction

RTI/MTSS schools typically collect building-wide academic screening data at fall, winter and spring checkpoints. These data-sets are invaluable, as they allow a school to judge the effectiveness of its core instruction and, if needed, provide guidance to teachers on strengthening their instructional practices.

It is a widely accepted rule of thumb that classroom instruction across a school can be considered adequate if at least 80% of students meet or exceed a screener’s performance cut-points. The close of the school year is an ideal time for administrators to meet with grade-level teams to review screening data and brainstorm future instructional ideas to boost students’ collective academic performance.

For real-world examples of how to use this best practice, download the free eBook RTI/MTSS and End of School Year.

3. Analyze Data to Uncover Performance ‘Pockets’

As schools build a strong RTI/MTSS model, they collect troves of data monitoring student performance. If this data is reliably archived, school leadership can analyze it to identify pockets of student performance that either exceed or lag behind expectations. For example, a school might compare the relative outcomes of two Tier 2 reading groups using the same program to see if there are significant differences across instructors.

This type of advanced RTI/MTSS ‘data mining’ requires that a school first standardize its procedures to ensure that data sources are valid and reliable and that student data is uniformly stored in electronic format for easy retrieval.

4. ‘Recalibrate’ RTI/MTSS Procedures

Every school that follows an RTI/MTSS model has its own procedures to identify students for services, document intervention plans, collect data, move students up and down the tiers of intervention and so on. The end of the school year is the perfect time to review the school’s actual RTI/MTSS practices, identify any gaps in implementation and ‘recalibrate’ to align those day-to-day practices with the expected RTI/MTSS procedures.

Data can help school staff uncover discrepancies in procedures. It is an expectation, for example, that in a ‘typical’ school, 1-5% of students might be referred to the Tier 3 RTI/MTSS Problem-Solving Team in a given school year. If, as summer approaches, fully 10% of a school’s students have been brought to Tier 3 during the current year, the school can follow up by reexamining its criteria for accepting a Tier 3 referral and how those criteria are being enforced by staff.

For a real-world example of how to use this best practice for Tier 1, download the free eBook RTI/MTSS and End of School Year.

5. Recruit Fall Groups Using End-of-Year Screeners

To identify students at academic risk, most schools screen the entire building population 3 times per year (fall/winter/spring). Those data are then used to recruit students whose risk profile indicates they require Tier 2/Tier 3 academic-intervention services. While fall screening data would seem to be the logical data source to recruit fall academic-intervention groups, it presents 2 limitations:

  1. Tier 2/3 interventionists cannot begin work with students until the school has conducted the fall screening and identified groups, resulting in several weeks of dead-time when at-risk learners are not receiving intervention services.
  2. In an effort to speed formation of fall intervention groups, the school may be tempted to screen immediately after the start of school. However, students often experience a ‘summer slide’ — a predictable and temporary drop in reading or math skills over the summer. For most students, the summer-slide effect disappears after 4-5 weeks of school. Therefore, schools that screen within the first 2-3 weeks of school are likely to ‘lock in’ temporary academic deficits and falsely identify at least some students for Tier 2/3 services whose skills would have rebounded on their own.

A solution is to use the end-of-year (spring) academic screening results for 2 purposes: (1) to enter or exit students for current spring Tier 2/3 services and also (2) to identify fall Tier 2/3 intervention groups before the summer break. This approach allows academic-intervention groups to meet immediately when school resumes in the fall and encourages the school to schedule the fall screening when student skills have fully recovered from the summer regression.

6. Update the RTI/MTSS Roll-out Plan

It can take 3 to 5 years to fully implement the RTI/MTSS academic model. Schools in the midst of rolling out RTI/MTSS will find that the final months of the current school year offer a good vantage point from which to firm up plans for the next phase of implementation slated to start in the fall.

While advanced RTI/MTSS planning is always a good idea, some elements of RTI/MTSS require it. Schools seeking to overhaul their system of Tier 2 (supplemental/small-group) interventions, for instance, may need to alter multiple elements, e.g. changing the schedule for those services and training Tier 2 providers to deliver new research-based intervention programs.

For a real-world example of how to update your RTI/MTSS roll-out plan, download the free eBook RTI/MTSS and End of School Year.

7. Prepare RTI/MTSS Professional Development

While schools often do a good job of outlining and implementing a comprehensive RTI/MTSS plan, they sometimes overlook the need to provide ongoing professional development to prepare their staff to understand, accept and work effectively within the plan. As school leaders use the close of the school year to reflect on the quality of RTI/MTSS implementation and proposed next steps, they should also consider what additional training teachers and support staff require to help improve delivery of RTI/MTSS services. This professional development plan should include both the essential RTI/MTSS content to be delivered to teachers and a training calendar extending into the coming school year with opportunities in large- and small-group settings to provide that professional development.

Read examples of RTI/MTSS professional development planning.

A Final Thought on Optimizing RTI/MTSS at End of Year

A key quality for success in implementing an RTI/MTSS model is simply that schools pay attention to the details, verify that records are complete and archived, close gaps between current and best practices and look forward to the next steps in the unfolding RTI/MTSS roll-out plan. The end of the school year is a strategic time for schools to focus their attention — make productive use of this pivotal moment between the recently elapsed and coming school years!

As you reflect on your RTI/MTSS program this spring, consider how Frontline RTI & MTSS Program Management can help you collect and analyze the data you’ll need to make next year even better for staff and students.

How School Districts Can Provide A Great Applicant Experience

Would you want to go through your school district’s hiring process?

A poor applicant experience is a problem even in the best of times. But with the teacher shortage set to worsen as fewer new educators enter the profession, it’s more important than ever that candidates have a delightful experience from the moment they apply to your district.

After all, an exceptional applicant experience means three things for your district:

  • Fewer barriers to application means a larger applicant pool
  • Candidates with a good experience are more likely to encourage other educators to apply
  • New hires are more engaged and prepared to succeed from day one

So, what can you do to ensure that your hiring process is a positive experience?

1.    Walk a mile in the job-seeker’s shoes

Look at your hiring process from the perspective of the job-seeker at every stage. Try to find where applicants might hit snags, or what steps might be unnecessarily time-consuming. Remember that great teachers may already be working full-time in another district and may not have hours to spend on your application process.

Are open positions easy to find online, or are they hidden away on your district website? Is it clear to applicants which materials they need to submit, and how to submit them? Do they have to send printed materials through the mail, or can everything required be uploaded electronically? Make sure to look beyond the application itself. Does it take several rounds of phone tag to schedule interviews? Will references be contacted several times by different people from the same district? An applicant tracking system can help streamline the hiring process for both you and applicants, making it a more pleasant experience all around.

2.    Communicate

According to Forbes, over 70 percent of online applicants never receive even a generic reply from would-be employers. Look for ways that you can be more communicative with applicants from the beginning, even if you don’t have time to write to each applicant individually. If you’re one of the few school districts that makes a point to acknowledge each and every teacher application — even if it’s an automated form response that isn’t personalized in any way — you’re already ahead of the game. It’s okay to have a template response, especially if you can make it both informative and interesting. It’ll set your school district apart and put the “Human” back in “Human Resources.” Plus, it’s just good etiquette.

Beyond the initial application, the more transparent you can be with job-seekers, the better. You may have a qualified, talented teacher candidate who is a great cultural fit, who never knows they’re one of your top picks. If they don’t hear anything from you for weeks while you work through bureaucratic internal processes, they may assume they won’t be hired and accept another district’s offer — even if working for your school district was their dream job.

3.    Set reasonable timeframes

Similarly, keep in mind that teachers need to have a plan. If a great teacher applies for a position in early May, but you aren’t able to make an offer until the end of August, that’s too late! It’s not fair to expect an exceptional candidate to wait months to receive an offer from your district, especially if other, faster districts have already made their hiring decisions. Like anyone else, teachers need to know where they will be working and what they will be doing ahead of time. This is especially true if they would need to relocate from another area in order to work in your school.

Be upfront about how long applicants can expect to wait to hear back. Hiring teachers will always have a degree of uncertainty — current teachers may decide not to return for the next year, or funding may not come through —  try to stick to the promised timeline as much as possible. If something does come up, make sure to communicate with candidates so they know where they stand.

4.    Seek feedback

You don’t need a “secret shopper” to get the inside scoop on your applicants’ experience with your hiring process. Gather feedback from both new employees and candidates who were not hired on an ongoing basis, so you can continually improve your hiring process. Remember: this isn’t a “once and done” thing: regularly implementing changes based on honest feedback will help your hiring process evolve.

When Cabot Public Schools decided to move to a new applicant tracking system, providing a great applicant experience was one of their top priorities. That’s why they chose Frontline Recruiting & Hiring.

Read the Case Study