Looking at Glass

Last week the Iowa TQP Team met with Jason Glass. It was my first time meeting our new Chief Learner, or Director, of the Iowa Department of Education. I had heard much and often read his tweets and occasionally read his blog so I had a sense of what I might expect. In my typical idealistic ways I decided to go in with an open mind and just listen to what his ideas were about teacher effectiveness and the direction of the grant. After all, how political could it be?

Everyone in the room agreed that Iowa needs a unified system of standards and evaluation from pre-service through career for educators. How we go about deriving these is where the division is apparent.

Currently there are disconnected pieces around the state. Higher education is tied to the InTASC standards. As an employee in PK-12 and AEA for much of the past 25 years, I had never heard of InTASC before last October when I began at UNI. Likewise, not all higher education folks have much working knowledge of the Iowa Teaching Standards, in part based on the Charlotte Danielson framework, by which all teachers in Iowa are evaluated. Each system offers highlights. Crosswalks between them show many similarities. Iowa has also joined on as a state in the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium which is testing our subject based teacher performance assessments. Each of these also offer merit in the discussion. So where are we going? At this point it isn't clear, but (politically) we are expected to arrive there in 2013.

Our UNI TQP Team met yesterday to consider our direction and our hope to communicate what we understand about the goals of our current situation with the Iowa TQP grant. Here are the key points we would like to have known through our Looking Glass:

•       The outcome of Goals 2 & 3 of the ITQP grant is the creation of a unified system of standards and evaluation for pre-service through career teachers.

•      The use of the Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium’s teacher performance assessment handbook and rubrics, which are based on the InTASC standards, places us in the context of the national conversation around effective teaching.

•      The UNI portion of the ITQP grant mandates collaboration with rural LEAs to build capacity for a full-scale implementation of the new standards and evaluation system.