Professional Growth and Effectiveness System: Some Basics

Across Kentucky, schools are moving rapidly to implement of our new statewide approach to teaching quality.  The new Professional Growth and Effectiveness System will replace past evaluations and provide a much deeper attention to feedback and support for individual teachers to grow steadily stronger in their craft.

The new approach will look at teaching from two different angles:

First, professional practice will matter, using evidence from multiple sources, including:
■ Observations of the teachers work by administrators and peers
■ Student voice surveys
■ Professional growth plans and self-reflection
■ Possibly, additional district-determined sources of evidence.
That evidence will be used to identify each teacher’s practice as being at one of four levels-- exemplary, accomplished, developing, or ineffective practice....

Second, student growth will also matter, looking at how students improve from year to year in each subject. For most teachers, that evidence will all be gathered locally, using student growth goals, professional judgment, and district-defined rubrics. For those who teach reading and mathematics in grades 4-8, some evidence will be gathered that way and added evidence will come from state assessments of those two subjects. Depending on the evidence, each teacher’s student growth will be rated at one of three levels: high, expected, or low growth. 

Those two sources of understanding will be combined to identify next steps for each teacher's further development as a professional.  You can learn more about the teacher system and the related system for principals from the Kentucky EdGuide on "Educator Growth and Effectiveness" (quoted above), and you can learn much more from the Kentucky Department of Education's PGES webpage.

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston