Enhancing Consistency and Clarity with T-TES
Our understanding...
The Texas Teacher and Evaluation Systems (T-TES), the state’s teacher performance evaluation system, is designed to support Texas teachers with research-based evidence to help them grow and develop as practitioners and ultimately drive student achievement.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is in the process of enhancing T-TES. This process will ultimately result in several critical revisions to the T-TES framework: Revisions that will require calibration across teacher appraisers for teachers (and school leaders) to have reliable and valid evidence upon which to base professional growth decisions and actions. Moreover, these enhancements will also require an additional and updated set of artifacts that can provide educators with concrete exemplars to help inform their professional growth pathways.
Introducing Teaching Channel's Calibrate
The Teaching Channel Platform offers a product feature called Calibrate. Calibrate helps administrators, coaches, and educators align on the concrete teaching strategies and practices that align with their district’s vision of high-quality instruction, student engagement, and performance expectations outlined in T-TES.
Calibrate Supports:
Appraiser Calibration
Appraiser Calibration enables certification of any teacher evaluator through asynchronous (and synchronous) assessments designed to calibrate these evaluators around a teacher observation rubric (T-TES). Credentials are conferred to those evaluators who have demonstrated the ability to reliably and validly assess teachers around this rubric-based assessment.
Please see the Ohio State Board of Education case study below for concrete examples of where we have provided this support to another large SEA.
See how Calibrate can streamline calibration of teacher observation ratings
Self-Directed and Guided Teacher Professional Growth
Calibrate allows for the development of a library of exemplary T-TES and TEKS-aligned videos of exemplary teaching practices. As a result, teachers looking to improve practice can leverage these videos as one of many tools to develop their teaching competencies and skills. Moreover, school leaders and instructional coaches can pair these T-TES-aligned videos with a course of professional development for all their teachers so they can view exemplary instruction without having to leave the classroom. To help jump-start the process – Teaching Channel’s Empower Platform hosts a library of over 2,000 videos of exemplary instruction differentiated by grade level, topic, subject, and by evaluation rubric.
Please see the Liberty University case study below for concrete examples of how the Teaching Channel Platform is being utilized to support teacher professional growth.
Key Functionality and Customization
Calibrate is highly customizable, allowing us to tailor a solution that meets the unique needs of our partnering SEAs and LEAs, and we can do the same for TEA.
Examples of this customization include:
- Establishing a “walled off” and co-branded version of the platform accessible only to designated users
- Customized authority and access rights to various user roles (e.g. SEA administrator, principal, coach, teacher, etc..)
- Alignment of platform to designated teacher evaluation/observation rubric (i.e. T-TES)
- Real-time individual and group reporting and dashboards
- Creation of unique assessment pathways based on roles and compliance standards
- SSO connections through Google SAML, Microsoft Entra, ClassLink, and Clever
- LTI integration with Canvas, Brightspace, and Schoology
Use Cases for Teaching Channel's Calibrate
Appraiser Calibration
Ohio State Board Of Education
The Ohio State Board of Education (SBOE) uses Calibrate to support more than 12,000 education leaders with evaluation credentialing for both principals and teachers. Principals and district leaders take these assessments to evaluate teachers and principals. In the assessments, they are asked to view a video and answer multiple-choice questions pertaining to the video. The assessment is used to ensure that when principals and school leaders evaluate their teachers, principals, and assistant principals, that they are aligned in their observation expectations.
Teacher Professional Development
Raymore-Peculiar School District
Raymore-Peculiar uses Teaching Channel’s Empower Professional Platform to track their teachers’ instructional effectiveness throughout the school year. They meet as a group and rate their teachers so that they are in alignment when providing feedback and coaching. They schedule three formal observations a year – one in the beginning of the year, one in the middle of the year, and one at the end of the year. In these formal observations, they ask their teachers to record their lessons and use the submission workflow on the platform for the formal rating processes. The submission workflow tracks the ratings and changes in ratings throughout the year. Between formal submissions, teachers share their lesson videos with coaches using the sharing workflow. Here, teachers get informal coaching feedback from their assigned mentor to practice and develop between their formal observations. This informal coaching might even include the mentor sharing Teaching Channel videos with teachers to get a better idea of where they want them to focus in their professional development. At the end of the year, Raymore-Peculiar’s assigned client success manager (CSM) will meet with them to go over their data and plans for the next academic year. The CSM also sends data reports throughout the academic year to ensure Raymore-Peculiars’ leadership team stays up to date with the data accumulated.
Teacher Professional Development
Liberty University
As with our over 90+ university partners, Liberty University uses our Professional product to support students in their educator preparation programs. Many of these university partners find Teaching Channel indispensable as student access to classrooms can be difficult, especially for those students in rural parts of their university communities. As it relates to Liberty University, they leverage the platform’s Assignment Maker to assign videos and actions to their students. The professors and administrators have collected videos from the Teaching Channel Video Library and embed these videos into Teaching Channel Assignment Maker. The students log into the Teaching Channel and view the videos. Within the Assignment Maker, our clients can also assign, self-reflect on a video, share a video, submit a video, upload documentation, and much more.
Interested to learn more about Calibrate’s streamlined approach as a customizable solution?
