The Network for Educator Effectiveness has always sought to address critical challenges in the field of education. Six years ago, we had the opportunity to become involved in the University of Missouri’s College of Education & Human Development accreditation process by providing a unique dataset: the first four years of performance data for beginning teachers. It turns out that data is really difficult for educator preparation programs to attain, and even harder to attain with any form of accuracy.

We know some apprenticeship programs collect data through a process that includes several Excel spreadsheets, hand-entered notes, and a lot of tedious work.

With NEE’s membership of more than 300 PK-12 school districts, we can make data collection easier and more accurate, and we started wondering what other ways we could support educator preparation programs and the educator ecosystem as a whole.

NEE is in a unique position for this work because we are well-connected to both the PK-12 and higher education spheres. As a unit within MU’s Assessment Resource Center (ARC), NEE has been involved in conversations about evaluation systems at Mizzou. Our colleagues at ARC maintain the systems to collect student feedback for courses at the university and worked toward developing a peer observation system that ultimately helped us push forward with the NEE POWERHub peer observation tool.

Over the past year, our team has brainstormed possibilities for NEE to further support educator preparation programs. We created the following list of ways NEE is positioned to help educator preparation programs manage the large amount of work they are tasked with:

  • Applicant tracking and placement: NEE can track potential pre-service teachers and their qualifications, then match them with suitable mentors and programs based on predefined criteria. We have worked to build a matching application as part of our POWERHub peer observation tool that helps teachers find model teachers that deploy effective teaching practices to observe. That application can be modified to help match apprentices with suitable mentors as measured by specifications set through the apprenticeship management program.
  • Employer partner management: NEE can establish a platform for managing partnerships with schools, districts, or other organizations working with an educator preparation program. NEE currently provides this platform with a stabilized onboarding procedure. NEE provides access to certain individuals at our network schools to be able to add user accounts, edit profiles, and manage tier one solutions.
  • Progress monitoring: NEE can track the progress of pre-service teachers through their training journey, including logging activities, assessments, and feedback from mentors and instructors. This can be done through a variety of evaluation measures and as either informal or formal processes. NEE currently incorporates the following teacher evaluation measures for PK-12 settings: (1) classroom observations, (2) student surveys, (3) professional development plans, (4) units of instruction, and (5) individual professional learning reflections.  These measures (and possible new measures) can be modified to best support the goals of educator preparation programs. NEE also provides reports and can design additional reports that best serve pre-service teachers, educator preparation programs, school districts, and other organizations to monitor progress.
  • The NEE POWERHub peer observation tool would generate a collaborative environment for the field experience process of educator preparation programs. The tool guides participants through an instructional coaching process of observing, collaborating, and learning from a peer or assisting a peer. It would allow pre-service teachers to partner with a cooperating teacher/mentor or a small group of peers to document an observation and then reflect and collaborate with others about the observation. POWERHub can allow for the student to observe other teachers and reflect on the focused classroom competency behaviors being reviewed with their supervisor and/or cooperating teacher.
  • Competency management: NEE can integrate with existing assessment tools or develop its own system to evaluate the performance of pre-service teachers against defined competencies. NEE can also develop a training system to onboard mentors, supervisors, or pre-service teachers (as well as others) to the specifications set out by the educator preparation program.
  • Data roll-ups: NEE can aggregate data on various aspects of the educator preparation program, allowing for reporting at different levels (individual, employer, regional, etc.) to analyze trends and identify areas for improvement.
  • Collaboration and communication: NEE can provide a platform for communication and collaboration between pre-service teachers, mentors, and instructors, facilitating knowledge-sharing and feedback exchange. This can be accomplished in both informal and formal structures to provide safe and secure coaching opportunities, as well as more structured summative assessment processes.
  • Resource repository: NEE can serve as a central repository for storing and sharing resources relevant to the educator preparation program, including materials, forms, and curriculum. NEE has an established on-demand professional learning library, EdHub, which includes a large collection of exemplar classroom teaching videos that are very popular among beginning teachers. The exemplar video collection could be used in educator preparation courses as a supplemental set of classroom observation experiences. By reducing the expense and time to travel to several school sites to see a specific teacher at each site, students could open the library collection and view several exemplar teachers across all grade levels and most subjects.
  • Data-driven insights: By analyzing data collected through NEE, stakeholders can gain valuable insights into the educator preparation program’s effectiveness, allowing for informed decision-making regarding resource allocation and strategic goals. This data can be reviewed at all levels including for individuals, employers, regions, or programs.
  • Supporting registered teacher apprenticeship: NEE can be tailored to specifically support possible registered teacher occupation apprenticeship by incorporating relevant program requirements, tracking specific competencies, and facilitating communication and collaboration within the program structure.

With the challenges currently facing the educator ecosystem, each of us has a role to play in improving the environment around education. NEE wants to ensure we are doing our part and doing all we can to help the teaching profession thrive.

Tom Hairston is the Managing Director of the Network for Educator Effectiveness and has worked with NEE since 2011. Prior to his work with NEE, he worked as a Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports Consultant for the Heart of Missouri Regional Professional Development Center at the University of Missouri. He began his career in education as a high school special education and language arts teacher and football coach at Moberly High School in Moberly, Mo. Tom received his PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis from the University of Missouri in 2012.

The Network for Educator Effectiveness (NEE) is a simple yet powerful comprehensive system for educator evaluation that helps educators grow, students learn, and schools improve. Developed by preK-12 practitioners and experts at the University of Missouri, NEE brings together classroom observation, student feedback, teacher curriculum planning, and professional development as measures of effectiveness in a secure online portal designed to promote educator growth and development.