Professional Growth Plan and Measures

Promising practices of flexibilities, efficiencies, and differentiation of the connection between the professional growth plan and measures

Did You Know?

There are opportunities to connect the goals for the Professional Growth Plan (PGP) and the Measures of Student Learning/Outcomes (MSL/Os) to create a cohesive evaluation. While the PGP goals encompass educator inputs and the measures reflect student outputs, both can be aligned to streamline the evaluation process.

In a suburb north of Denver, Adams 12 Five Star Schools in Thornton has created Advancing Professional Excellence (APEX) as the professional growth and performance system for educators in its district. APEX believes that high quality reflective educators create high performing schools and is designed to support the professional growth of building leaders, teachers and specialized service professionals (SSPs) through reflective practice and purposeful feedback. "Through our APEX planning, we encourage people to align the work that they are already doing at their school," says director of professional learning Megan Cain. "For example, we are currently under an agreement with the Department of Justice for our English Language Learner students. Everyone across the system will participate in six training sessions over the course of the year and be expected to implement their learning at the school level. As a result, we encourage educators to choose this as a goal for the Professional Growth Plan, measure student progress with their Student Learning Objective, receive focused feedback from both administrators and their coach, and reflect on themselves as learners and the impact they are having on students." Principals act as sense-makes to minimize concerns of losing autonomy in order to move past this fear as an obstacle in the process. The long term impact is that the district has been able to move together as a system and make evaluation a meaningful growth process addressing student achievement gaps. "Goals become more attainable and people feel supported by one another," Megan concludes.