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In many respects, good instruction is good instruction regardless of the content area or grade level where the instruction takes place. This means the NEE teacher evaluation indicators and rubrics work equally well when used with a high school math teacher, a PE teacher, or a kindergarten teacher. Although the strategies used by each teacher may differ, their goal is still to motivate, engage, and support students in their learning.

However, some educators bear additional responsibilities that differ greatly from those involved in traditional classroom instruction. For example, school librarians develop and manage the library collection and provide information access to teachers and students. School counselors establish and provide a comprehensive guidance and counseling program for their school. Speech-language pathologists evaluate students and provide services that comply with state and federal regulations to meet students’ needs. Instructional coaches plan, prepare, and deliver support to foster the professional growth of the teachers they serve. NEE recognizes that traditional classroom observations cannot adequately evaluate these additional responsibilities. In response, we have developed specialized tools to allow for the evaluation of school specialists.

NEE currently offers an expanded evaluation for use with:

  • School counselors
  • Librarians
  • Speech-language pathologists
  • Instructional coaches
  • Paraprofessionals (offered in paper-pencil format only; see special section below)

Evaluating School Counselors, Librarians, Speech-Language Pathologists and Instructional Coaches

NEE offers two models for specialist evaluation:

  • The Full Model is aimed at specialists who provide instruction to students. For these individuals, the specialist evaluation organizer is used in place of the Unit of Instruction to examine their unique responsibilities. The remaining components of the teacher model including classroom observations, the student survey, and the teacher professional development plan are utilized as usual.
  • The Simple Model is used for specialists who do not typically provide instruction for students or do so only for individuals or very small groups. This model uses only the specialist organizer. When using the Simple Model, NEE strongly recommends that the specialist also completes a teacher professional development plan.

The specialist evaluation begins with the relevant specialist evaluation organizer that is created and completed by the specialist. Each specialist evaluation includes elements that are based on the standards for high-quality work that have been developed by the national organization for that group. NEE suggests that 3-5 of the elements be selected for evaluation during a single school year. The same elements can be selected for district-wide use, one set can be selected for elementary specialists while using a different set for secondary specialists, or each specialist can select their own.

Specialists create their organizer and complete it by addressing the selected elements. For each element, the specialist:

  • Describes their goal for meeting the rubric criteria.
  • Details the process to be followed to meet the goal.
  • Identifies the method that will be used to document their achievement of the goal.

The goals may or may not represent program changes depending on how well the program currently meets the rubric criteria. When complete, the specialist submits their organizer for pre-implementation approval. Once it is approved by the evaluator, the specialist documents their work on each element. The evaluator and specialist meet to review the plan and discuss progress at mid-year and again near the end of the data cycle. The evaluator scores the specialist evaluation organizer before completing the summative report for the specialist.

The online organizers become available in the NEE Data Tool in July when it is rolled to the new school year. A Word Doc version of each organizer is available in the Data Tool under the Help and Resources menu. Specialists are encouraged to begin their work on the Doc version, save it locally as a backup, and then copy/paste their work into the online organizer once it becomes available in July each year.

For additional training, evaluators will find a training module on each specialist evaluation tool in EdHub under the NEE Training Materials topic. The EdHub modules provide step-by-step instructions for using each of the specialist evaluation tools. The Help and Resources section of the Data Tool also provides a copy of the rubric for each specialist evaluation and a set of instructions for processing and scoring the evaluations.

As always, feedback remains an important aspect of the evaluation process. NEE’s Guide to Effective Feedback Conversations and NEE’s Four Paths to Effective Feedback provide strategies to implement effective feedback for teachers, and the concepts can be applied to school specialists as well.

Evaluating Paraprofessionals

Paraprofessional educators can be challenging to evaluate because the roles they play in the school can be entirely different depending on the teachers and students they serve and the needs they aim to meet. Although NEE does not have an online evaluation tool to use when evaluating your paraprofessionals, we offer a paper-pencil evaluation form that may be helpful. Both the form and its rubric are located in the Help and Resources section of the Data Tool. Type “para” in the search bar to locate them. There are five elements in the evaluation that can be selected individually or personalized to provide the most effective evaluation possible for paraprofessional educators.

Evaluating Other School Specialists

Finally, NEE has a new evaluation tool under development. It is aimed at the evaluation of those individuals in your district whose positions fall under the “other” category. These folks are not classroom teachers, building administrators, or the specialists we have already discussed. Rather than creating a separate evaluation tool for every possible position ranging from curriculum supervisors to IT technicians to custodians, NEE is designing a “jigsaw” evaluation. This new tool will allow the evaluator and the individual to select from numerous skills and responsibilities to formulate a personalized evaluation tool. These evaluations can be tailored to fit the unique roles played by any number of individuals in your school district. The summative report for the resulting evaluations will have a cohesive look for all individuals and will reside in the NEE Data Tool. Watch for this new tool in Fall 2023.

Teacher growth is at the heart of NEE. Now we aim to broaden our “Simple but Powerful” suite of tools to meet all the evaluation and professional growth needs of your district. Please contact the NEE Help Desk at nee@missouri.edu or 844-793-4357 if you have questions or need help getting started using the specialist and paraprofessional evaluation tools.

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.