Professional Development
Recent education reforms encourage teachers, schools, and districts to collect a variety of student data. Teachers, principals, and school and district leaders need professional development to understand what information the data provides about students and how educators can use that information to improve student learning in the classroom. VARC works with clients to build their educators’ and administrators’ capacity to understand and use this information.
VARC has created professional development materials and presented seminars, workshops, and webinars around a variety of topics that include:
- An introduction to student growth measures with our popular Oak Tree Analogy
- Combining multiple measures of educator effectiveness into a single rating and pitfalls to avoid
- Reading and interpreting student growth reports
- Choosing student assessments that allow states and districts to include a greater number of educators in evaluation systems
- Understanding state legislative requirements for growth measures and how to implement them
- Fostering cross-district collaboration that allows for the development of quality student growth measures
- Creating and implementing student learning objectives (SLOs)
As schools, districts, and states continue to use more and better data to improve student learning, VARC has evolved its professional development to meet specific educator needs for data-driven decision-making.