October 3, 2016 3 min read
Success Story: Choice Schools Create Impactful Learning Environment through Streamlined Staff Evaluations
Industry:
Solution:
The Scenario
Choice Schools Associates (CSA) is a full-service charter school management company headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As the management company for 12 charter schools throughout the state, CSA provides a full range of customized, hands-on services specific to school operations in areas such as human resources, accounting, payroll, marketing, teacher training and more.
Working directly with the Board of every school to serve their particular goals and objectives, CSA’s overarching mission is to empower every child with the knowledge, skills, character, and work ethic to achieve their American dream.
The Challenge
Committed to providing an impactful and enjoyable learning environment across its 12 schools, CSA recognizes the importance of moving away from a paper-based evaluation system to a more streamlined, online process.
CSA also required a customizable platform that would address the unique needs of each of its schools, consisting of Montessori schools, traditional public school academies, and several environmental science schools. Furthermore, the platform would need to support evaluation initiatives for all staff members, including bus drivers, custodians and school nutrition personnel. After evaluating several options, Vector Evaluations+ (formerly TeachPoint) was selected based on the platform’s broad capabilities, as well as the Vector Evaluations+ team’s level of responsiveness and commitment to customer service.
The Solution
Vector Evaluations+ is an intuitive, fully-customizable evaluation solution that saves schools time and money by automating the entire evaluation process. Through Vector Evaluations+’s streamlined platform, Choice Schools is able to easily perform impactful classroom observations, while delivering timely and effective teacher, administrator and staff evaluations for all its employees. With Vector Evaluations+, the CSA team is able to:
- Streamline the entire evaluation process
- Incorporating company values
- Ensuring rubric alignment
- Access all information from a centralized location
- Including forms and evidence
- Easily upload evidence
- Including videos, photos and documents
- Enhance collaboration and feedback
- Engaging evaluators and staff
Furthermore, Choice Schools was able to work with the TeachPoint team to incorporate the requirements of Michigan’s new Performance Evaluation System for Teachers and School Administrators. Plus, CSA staff members have been given the added benefit of being able to take advantage of the Vector Professional Development (PD) Tracking Tool, enabling them to schedule, manage and track PD initiatives and accomplishments across the CSA employee base.
The Results
Since implementing Vector Evaluations+ in 2014, Choice Schools has been able to significantly improve evaluation timeliness across nearly every department. This is possible because they can easily open any evaluation form from a centralized location, rather than searching through emails and files. Administrators and principals can easily view progress and PD goal information when conducting walkthroughs and observations.
In addition, overall accountability has also increased, as principals are now able to track the time spent evaluating a particular teacher–recognizing the need for spending more or less time with a teacher in the future. As a result of implementing Vector Evaluations+, CSA has been able to improve evaluation effectiveness and cultivate improved teacher and staff performance.
