CCSSO State Consortium on Educator Effectiveness scee.groupsite.com

The month's SCEE featured video highlights some of the conversations from the June 2010 Education Sector event, "Finding the Link: Teacher Evaluation and Professional Development." 

In this three minute segment, Brad Jupp states that the policy changes in teacher evaluation are grounded in the spirit of continuous improvement.  He argues that rather than focus on merit pay or firing teachers, the intent of including student performance as a significant element of teacher evaluation is to provide the more than 3 million practitioners across the country with the data that will help them move student achievement forward.  With student performance data ..

On April 23, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hosted the Teachers of the Year in the Rose Garden.  You can watch coverage here on SCEE's featured video.  CCSSO's Teacher of the Year program recognizes 54 teachers from across the country and culminates in a week of activities in Washington, DC, and the announcement of the National Teacher of the Year. 

Surrounded by the state teachers of the year, President Obama thanked all teachers for their hard work and dedication, saying "what you do matters" and "teaching is a profession and it should be treated like one."  ..

This week as CCSSO hosts the Teachers of the Year in Washington, DC, we are all taking some time to thank the teachers in our lives. And the teachers of the year are too! In the new SCEE featured video several of these exceptional teachers offer thanks for the educators that most impacted their lives.

The video includes Lauren Eckman (GA), Heidi Welch (NH), Michael Funkhouser (WV), Amy McAllister (SC), Jeremy Wagner (TX), Tricia Miller (PA), John Sell (DE), and Amanda Westernberg (CO). Visit CCSSO on Facebook To hear more from these teachers and others.

We encourage you to join us ..

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  ..

Happy New Year! We salute your hard work throughout 2012 and wish you happiness, prosperity, and purpose in 2013. 

We are taking a bit of a winter break, and will not blog between December 24 and January 1. 

If you have a few moments, we encourage you to visit SCEE's featured video archives (short but pithy videos on various topics ranging from a minute and a half to the longest one which lasts 17 minutes), archived reports, webinars, blog posts, and discussions. They represent a rich source of information, research, and perspective that may benefit ..

The latest SCEE Featured Video, "Teachers on Teacher Evaluation" is produced by Teach Plus and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Teach Plus Fellows from Memphis, Tennessee and D.C., including a number of teachers from the elementary, middle, and high school levels, lend insights into their experiences with old teacher evaluation systems and the differences they are experiencing as their districts and states move to new ones.  More than that, they share their hopes for the development process of these new evaluation systems. 

Among the salient points they made regarding old teacher evaluation systems included:

• Old evaluation ..

( Note: This is a guest blog by Andrea Hajek, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards)

Aʻohe hana nui ke aluʻia -- “No task is too big when done together.”

The Challenge:  Not sufficient capacity to train principals as evaluators

While I would never overly simplify the thoughtful and hard work that goes into developing and implementing a fair and reliable educator evaluation system, this Hawaiian proverb illustrates that any task is indeed a coordinated effort, including teacher quality in the aloha state.

I served as the facilitator for the 2012 SCEE team from Hawai`i. Our conversations there, just ..

Videos from SCEE's 2012 National Summit, along with the corresponding PowerPoint presentations, are now available HERE.

Among the videos posted are:

• Keynote: Teaching and Learning Systems: Creating our Future (Ramona Pierson)
• Question and Answers with Ramona Pierson

o In the SCEE tradition, we opened the Summit with a challenge to think anew about learning and teaching. Ramona Pierson offered many ideas to "architect mass customized, personalized learning to scale," including: adjusting education delivery to students rather than the other way around (adaptive, individualized instruction); layering information; and a new way to think about ed schools ..

Margaret Reed Millar's blog mentioned the Teaching Channel's videos featuring 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Brown Wessling, facilitating effective literary discussions based on the Common Core State Standards.  As we work with states to make connections between the Common Core and educator effectiveness, we are featuring Wessling's video "Pinwheel Discussions: Texts in Conversation" on the SCEE home page.

In the video, Wessling demonstrates how to re-envision teaching to let students take center stage and move learning beyond fill-in-the-blank and perfunctory answers to more authentic critical thinking.  These outcomes are goals of the Common Core, and achieving them ..

Success at the Core (SaC), a nonprofit online professional learning organization that was highlighted at the SCEE 2011 Summit, is offering Northwest states an opportunity to receive technical assistance and support around their free online professional learning resources. SaC has funding to work with two additional states (they are currently working with Washington and New Jersey) to help them learn about and align the online materials with their own state priorities.  The in-kind resources and supports total over $100,000 per state.  Pacific Northwest states beyond Washington that are eligible to apply include: Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon.  Click here for the  ..