Providence Public Schools, Rhode Island’s largest school district, has selected Teachscape to advance its teacher evaluation and professional development processes. Teachscape will help the district implement its evaluation system for 2,000 educators, including teachers, administrators, and support professionals. Teachscape will also help Providence deliver individualized online professional learning for each of its teachers.
“Our overarching goal is to dramatically improve student achievement by focusing intentionally on improving the quality of education in our district. We want to ensure that we are doing everything we can to support educator effectiveness so that we can continue to attract and retain the most effective educators possible,” said Nkolika Onye, Executive Director of Performance Management at Providence Public Schools.
The district is implementing Teachscape’s products, Teachscape Focus, Teachscape Reflect,and Teachscape Learn, in a multi-phased approach. It began working with Teachscape three years ago to conduct classroom walkthroughs. “The tools for conducting classroom walkthroughs provide our administrators with the ability to collect classroom data quickly, and then share the data with their teachers. Together, teachers and administrators are able to reflect upon and analyze their findings, make instructional decisions, implement and monitor for improvement.”
Today, all of the district’s 100 evaluators, which includes principals, assistant principals, and certificated central office administrators, have been trained and assessed using the Teachscape Focus observation training and assessment system to help them better conduct fair and reliable teacher evaluations using Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching in conjunction with the Rhode Island Innovation Consortium Framework. “As the largest district in the state with more than 24,000 students, 2,000 teachers and 100 evaluators, inter-rater reliability is crucial. Teachscape Focus is of tremendous and obvious value,” said Onye.
Providence will use the Teachscape Reflect observation and evaluation system to electronically conduct and manage each of its evaluation processes for teachers, administrators, and support professionals in their entirety.
“Teachscape Reflect will allow Providence to more readily integrate multiple measures so that evaluators can begin to develop a more accurate assessment of educator effectiveness,” said Onye. “Together, evaluators and educators will be able to engage in focused conversations based on the observation results.”
Teachscape Learn is a key component of Providence’s professional development process. It is a video-rich professional learning system that provides teachers with tools to plan and track their professional growth and access to online learning communities, video channels, more than 160 Teachscape courses, plus the district’s offerings.
