Group Ideas....

Our group discussed this in detail and here are the ideas we came up with

For our funding we decided that it would cost more than OTES because we want people with educational backgrounds who are doing the observations/assessment of teachers we don't think the principal should. This way it is a complete outsider who doesn't personally know the teacher so it doesn't influence how they rate them.  These people should be trained to communicate and have sit down meeting with the teachers to work on what they need to improve on whether this is going to a class that will help improve their skills or just some suggestions. We don't want our teacher predicting how many students are going to meet certain standards because this seem unrealistic instead teachers will set goals of what they would like to see and achieve.  There will be two assessments or evaluations each quarter, this will be done for each teacher so we will need multiple people who are qualified to evaluate teachers. Each teacher will have different people each time, which will allow for different suggestions this way someone might have a different idea for a teacher or a suggestion that another observer hadn't made yet.The observations will be 50 percent surprise visits to see how they teach when you don't now they are coming and 50 percent planned so the teacher can prepare ahead of time. There will be a teaching committee for the teachers where all the teachers in that content area or grade will get together once a month to see how each other is doing. We decided that the teachers will see their evaluations like I stated earlier and know what they did well on and need to improve on. Their salary can increase if they are doing really well and getting good results in the classroom as well. We also decided though that money won't be taken away if they are "bad "teachers. If after several years there is no improvement then the teacher can be fired because we don't want teacher who are not helping children. Teachers will also be required to have portfolios of children's work to show improvement in the classroom even if test scores don't show it. Fro example if a student still scores really low on a test but the teacher can show that they started out at a third grade reading level and now is at a sixth grade this is huge improvement even though the 8th grade test doesn't show it. This will help teachers to show that they are improving their students.  

Michelle Thomas 

Alyssa Burkhart 

Felicia Woo

Elias Alvarez Bethany Hoehne