How do you know if it’s working?

TeachFirst gives your team the tools to measure progress at all levels, to provide accountability, build leadership capacity, and support data-driven professional development.

Teacher Self-assessments

TeachFirst provides a suite of online tools that allow teachers to enter periodic self-evaluations. These tools assess each teacher’s level of comfort, skill, and progress with both the PLC process and classroom implementation of instructional strategies. Teacher-leaders and school administrators can review aggregated teacher self-assessments to get a current snapshot of how things are going at the PLC or building level.

PLC Summaries

TeachFirst provides an online tool to capture the results of each PLC meeting. These PLC summary reports document the discussion and proceedings, identify action steps, and quantify where each PLC and school is actually spending its professional development time. Principals can access all PLC Summaries in their building to monitor ongoing progress, and district administrators can monitor the same information across all schools.

Periodic Progress Evaluation

At key points during the academic year, TeachFirst consultants help school leadership teams assess overall progress in PLCs, individual classrooms, and school-wide. Self-reported data can be mapped to classroom, school, and district-wide student assessments to drive continuous improvement at all levels.

Planning

Each spring, facilitators prepare presentations about the past year’s successes and challenges in their PLCs. PLC data is combined with benchmarks and testing data to create a complete picture of the previous year and design next year’s plan.