CCSSO State Consortium on Educator Effectiveness scee.groupsite.com

As practitioners and policy makers seek ways to improve instruction and assessment, interest in competency-based instruction has grown over the past few years.  To further explore the relationship between competency-based practices and educator evaluation, SCEE is offering a two-part blog series.  Particularly, as schools, districts, and states begin to integrate the Common Core State Standards, competency-based instruction offers a different means of using standards to drive student learning on an individualized basis, allowing for "all students to [attain] the highest levels, empowers them to own and lead the learning process,...and equips them with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to succeed..." (Delorenzo, ..

SCEE members, keep your eyes on what is going on in Providence RI in the upcoming months.  A non-profit education management organization was recently formed to lead an innovative reform effort, United Providence! (UP!).This district level transformation plan is based on a unique labor-management collaborative model between the Providence Public School District (PPSD) and the Providence Teachers' Union (PTU).  

NCLB and the implementation of federal requirements for the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program created an opportunity for the PPSD and the PTU to do some creative problem solving and generate a unique approach to putting a transformation ..

In a continuation from earlier blogs on teacher practice and the importance of professional learning and training from a recent Charlotte Danielson interview by Liz Griffen (January, 2013), we offer more excerpts regarding the role of district leaders. This excerpt is reprinted with permission the School Administrator magazine, published by the American Association of School Administrators. The full article is available at HERE.

What lessons have district leaders learned from past implementation efforts?

DANIELSON: When my framework was first published, a large urban district wanted to revise its evaluation system. It had been a terrible system - top down, ..

This blog expands on discussions about honing skillful leadership practices initiated at the February SCEE Topical Meeting.     

I recently read Education Week's report, Leaders to Learn From 2013: Lessons from District Leaders. Having just returned from the February SCEE Topical Meeting where I took part in conversations about growing leadership skills, I found echoes of those conversations here and some concrete examples of how leadership skills impact opportunities for improved educator effectiveness. The report features sixteen local districts, highlighting the leadership actions of superintendents, assistant superintendents, union leaders, and others who accomplished measurable results in low-performing schools. ..

Leveraging Professional Learning to Increase Principal Effectiveness

Last week, CCSSO's State Consortium on Educator Effectiveness (SCEE) joined our collaborative partners Learning Forward and CCSSO's Implementing the Common Core Standards Consortium (ICCS) in hosting the Topical Meeting: Leveraging Professional Learning to Increase Principal Effectiveness. Carrie Heath Phillips (CCSSO), Fred Brown (Learning Forward), and Mary Canole (CCSSO) served as meeting hosts. The meeting agenda included sessions that built skills, shared best practice, and provided opportunities to apply new learning to your state's context and work. State teams finished the two-day meeting with new strategies to try out in their ..

Our latest featured video, from Edutopia, gives us the chance to see how Ngee Ann Secondary School in Singapore leverages technology to engage students in active learning.  The Ministry of Education's 2009 masterplan called Curriculum Vision 2015 (C2015), included asking the Educational Technology Division  to ensure that students in Singapore develop Information and Communications Technology (ICT) skills by placing technology at the center of student learning.  The goal was to "harness technology to transform learners" and to create students who:

1. are anchored in strong moral values;
2. possess social and emotional competencies;
3. have ICT skills, civic literacy, cross cultural skills; and  ..

I came across a webinar to be held this Friday (February 1 from 2:30-3:30 pm EST) that may help you think about how to measure student achievement in non-tested subjects and grades for purposes of teacher evaluation.

CompetencyWorks and iNACOL are presenting a webinar on how competency-based schools are developing dynamic systems of assessments. They say this about their webinar (I highlighted the topic that caught my eye for SCEE):

In 2011, the Proficiency-based Pathways project was launched.... Along with eight other schools, Casco Bay High School (Maine) with its partner Expeditionary Learning and Vergennes Union High School (Vermont) were ..

Gov. Terry Branstad and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds today released an education reform package that will bring Iowa closer to its goal of providing a world-class education to all children, no matter where they live.

Building World-Class Schools for Iowa: A Legislative Brief

The package presented for the 2013 legislative session focuses on providing great teaching in every classroom to raise student achievement and to prepare Iowa's children to compete for jobs in a competitive global economy.

"We have many good schools with committed educators, but they are stuck in a system designed for the 20th century, not the 21st century," ..

The National Governors Association (NGA), National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), and CCSSO partnered to present a webinar, "Using Policy to Improve Principal Preparation," this past Tuesday.  This webinar was funded through The Wallace Foundation.

Cortney Rowland, Senior Policy Analyst at NGA, opened the webinar by noting that principal preparation has gained attention of late. Nearly 46 states having adopted leadership standards, many of them using the ISLLC Standards as a guide.  In addition, 31 states have passed laws regarding principal preparation and support.

The webinar highlighted the importance of states working closely with their legislatures.  Sara Shelton, Program Principal at ..

In the first blog post of this series on finance and its role in K-12 public education, it was evident that the educator workforce, in particular SEAs, are expected to do more with less due to ongoing financial barriers. While demands of better accountability, educator effectiveness, high student achievement, etc. are increasing; so is the tightness of budgets.

This second blog relies on the report, How Americans Would Slim Down Public Education, from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to assess how Americans responded to decreasing budgets with continuously increasing demands within the education workforce.  In March 2012, one of the ..