Saving Up to 40 Minutes with Higher Quality Teacher Evaluations

Challenges

• Principals spent about an hour on paperwork for each teacher evaluation  
• Cumbersome processes slowed everybody down 
• Evaluations focused more on compliance than supporting teacher growth 

Products & Solutions

• PowerSchool Perform

Results

• Simplified evaluations process saving principals up to 40 minutes per evaluation 
• Digital evaluations that promote teacher/principal collaboration 
• Clear scoring and personalized feedback that supports teacher growth and can be tracked over time

Serving 20,000 students near Birmingham, AL, Shelby County Schools took the opportunity in 2016 to redesign their teacher evaluation model. They had state guidelines to follow, but they had the freedom to build a process that could better serve their teachers, principals, and staff.

Dr. Resia Brooks, Human Resources Coordinator at Shelby County Schools, says quality was the focus from the start. Her HR team wanted to develop a process that would encourage collaboration and help principals and administrators better support teachers. While meeting compliance standards was the focus in the past, she envisioned a new way forward that would prioritize personalized support and growth.

The district started by identifying eight key indicators that align with state-provided quality teaching standards. From there, they set about enabling more detailed feedback and clear scoring. Early on, it became clear that the additional paperwork this approach created would make the process more burdensome.

Brooks knew the last thing her teachers and principals needed was more paperwork. She told her staff, “I promise you next year, we’re going to have a really, really great solution to this.” So she went looking for a solution to the paperwork problem—a way to digitize the process and simplify tasks by eliminating paperwork.

Simplifying Teacher Evaluations with an Easy-to-Implement Tool

Soon after promising to find a digital solution for teacher evaluations, Brooks discovered PowerSchool Perform. The online tool for teacher evaluations gave them the flexibility to configure their own rubrics while eliminating paper forms as part of the process. Brooks says, “Teachers and principals can breeze through the evaluation process because it’s seamless.” By unifying Perform with district HR data, information like demographic, location, and time automatically fills. Principals can focus on recording their observations, and then the evaluation becomes available for the teacher to review.

As a former principal in the district, Jennifer Galloway, HR Supervisor at Shelby County Schools, says the new process removes a lot of burden from principals while providing higher quality feedback for teachers. “I love being able to take a laptop into the classroom for the observation,” she says, “because by the time you leave that lesson, you pretty much have your evaluation completed.” According to Galloway, going digital turned out to be easier all the way around.

The simplicity of the new digital teacher evaluations made the process easier to implement and easier to train new principals and teachers to use. Galloway says, “The training for us didn’t take very long, and it was easy to implement.” In their district, administrators get a two-hour training session and a two-page starter guide that answers most questions that come up. Teacher training centers on a quick two-minute video. “It’s very easy,” Brooks says, “We’ve not had one single problem or question from a teacher about our evaluation process or our model.”

Focusing On Collaboration and Growth Instead of Ticking Boxes

Brooks explains that finding the right technology to digitize teacher evaluations made it possible to focus more on quality. Ultimately, the simplicity of the new online process also saves teachers and principals substantial amounts of time. Because principals and administrators can enter information directly into the rubric during observations using their laptop or tablet, they’re able to complete the process much faster. In addition to providing better feedback, the faster process also helps keep the information timely so teachers can better understand how they are scored.

Through Perform, teachers can quickly complete their reflection form in response to the evaluation score. Then, the post-observation conference is scheduled. By that time, the observed lesson is still fresh in their minds, both teacher and administrator have posted their comments in Perform, and everyone’s on the same page.

Galloway says it makes post-observation conferences more valuable, allowing the conversation to focus more on improvements and growth. “Sitting down with the teacher, side-by-side, and bringing up the observation together, looking at it, going through it—it’s very easy. You don’t have papers everywhere, and they see what you see. All the information is very transparent, and you can just have an easy dialogue with the teachers,” she says.

Saving Countless Hours with High-Quality Evaluations Is Just the Start

Dr. Brooks says the simplified teacher evaluations process with Perform does more than saving the district countless hours while supporting teacher growth at the school level. At the district level, she says Perform also helps them understand where support is needed most. “We’re able to see where everyone in the district is at the click of a button,” Brooks says, “in terms of who completed their evaluations and who may need a little bit more support.” This gives them even more power to lift the entire district.

Brooks and Galloway say Perform gives principals and district leaders the tools they need to support teacher growth, give teachers clear and collaborative feedback, and maximize their efforts to support teacher needs while improving instruction for students. In the end, it’s truly about better outcomes. Switching to digital teacher evaluations let Shelby County Schools shed the extra paperwork and accelerate toward brighter futures for every classroom.