Authentic and Engaging Inquiry
Ashley Favorite (Professional Biography)
“Going through the journey causes one to change as a professional. You are different than when you started because you’ve changed your approach, and in doing so you’ve learned new strategies.”
Linda Kuhaupt (Professional Biography)
“I’ve found that when I talk with teachers about making sure that the SLO mimics the kind of goal setting we do in real life it makes more sense.”
Matt Renwick (Professional Biography)
“How can we look at what we’re truly interested in with what we do every day in the classroom and collect data around those interests to see if they can become better?”
Strategic Assessment
Jorge Covarrubias (Professional Biography)
“I went into teaching to make a difference. People come into teaching to make a difference, and I think this just allows us to focus that much more on what is that difference we want to see?”
Megan Dixon (Professional Biography)
Vicki Porior (Professional Biography)
“When you pull together as a building - a team - the SLO process is really a whole lot less about filling out paperwork and being compliant with Educator Effectiveness, and instead it’s about changing the culture of a building and ultimately about changing what happens in a classroom.”
Meghan Retallick (Professional Biography)
“I would encourage people to not work alone in this process. Utilize resources in your building to really explode your own learning and that of your students.”
Rigor and Focus
Rhonda Bengtson (Professional Biography)
“As a special education teacher, I’m certainly well aware of writing IEP goals. I have to constantly remind myself that that’s just a projection, an educated guess of where students are going to be at. The SLO process is basically the same thing. We’re making our best guess. In the world of statistics 100% rarely all fall on that projected point.”
Amy Lubben (Professional Biography)
“You have that data floating around in your mind, and you know where your kids are at, and you know where you want them to go, but the process has helped me to evaluate and evaluate more often and take a look at midyear interval and see how my students are doing.”
Ashlee Whitty (Professional Biography)
“I really appreciated how it had the potential to transform my practice throughout the process. At no point throughout the SLO process or PPG process did I feel that it was purely evaluative. I felt like it was more transformative. As you go through the process you are really focusing on your target population. What are their critical needs and how are you going to meet them?”
Coaching and SLOs
Theresa Morateck (Professional Biography)
“One of my biggest challenges was finding that balance between the perceived top-down compliance piece with transformation of teaching and learning.”
Rachel Tassler (Professional Biography)
“I will continue to think of it [SLOs] as a process and not a product. I focused on getting that “4” at the end. That really wasn’t what it was all about. It was really about how I was going about getting there. The collaborations that I was having - the interactions that I was having - those were a lot more important than the score at the end.”
Disciplinary Literacy
Vicki Porior (Professional Biography)
“When you pull together as a building - a team - the SLO process is really a whole lot less about filling out paperwork and being compliant with Educator Effectiveness, and instead it’s about changing the culture of a building and ultimately about changing what happens in a classroom.”
Meghan Retallick (Professional Biography)
“I think that SLOs have pushed us at the secondary level to think about literacy and how that works in all the content areas.”