I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season and wishes
for a great 2014!
This post will provide a recap of the Supporting All
Employees – Classified Advisory Committee Meeting that was held on December 10,
2013. My previous post provides a link
to the agenda and presentation, but you can find them again here – agenda and presentation.
The majority of the meeting was spent discussing the pilot
of the Classified Growth & Development Cycle (CGDC), or new classified
performance evaluation process. I
provided a timeline, which you can find here, in order to show when various
parts of the cycle are to be completed.
While the timeline is already somewhat compressed for the year, I am
being flexible with deadlines. I realize
that people are busy and the process can seem cumbersome the first time
through.
Slide 3 of the presentation includes a breakdown of the
participants in the pilot. While this
does not reflect the makeup of the initial proposal, it comes close and does
include quite a number of employees from school sites. We are actually finding that Principals
supervising classified employees are fairly willing to participate in the
process. This is despite the fact that
they are also evaluating about half of the teachers at their site. The reasons for this probably include comfort
with an expanded process that adds more value to the employee due to what they
are seeing with the new teacher evaluations, and the fact that the classified
employee does a majority of the work in the CGDC process, which is unlike what
they are experiencing with the new teacher evaluations.
The supervisors of the pilot participants were invited to a
half-day training session in October to explain the process and how they can
initiate the work. This training was not
mandatory, and about half of the supervisors attended a session. We plan to have a second half-day session
early in 2014. Employee participants did
not receive specific training, but a variety of online resources were made
available to them describing the various steps in the process. Additionally, there are also online resources
for the supervisors. These can be found
at: http://classifiedtraining.lausd.net/employee_resources/jit/educator_growth_development_cycle_egdc.
I also presented a list of some of the feedback that we will
capture as part of the pilot. We plan to
survey participants and their supervisors two to three times throughout the
year. The list, found here, includes
data that we can capture on the back end of the evaluation tools as well as
information that we can obtain through a survey. The first survey will be sent out early in
2014.
In order to maintain some consistency with the growth and
development cycles that we are using for teachers and school leaders, we are
considering ways in which to capture stakeholder feedback. At the meeting, I presented a list of the
components that we have included in the CGDC, and highlighted those which
seemed to lend themselves to ratings by stakeholders – customers, peers,
subordinates, etc. You can find that
list of components here, and I have also included the Classified Performance
Framework, which further defines the components and may be helpful, here. I
drafted a very preliminary survey for the Advisory Committee to react to. No decisions were made at the meeting, except
to agree that I would come back with information captured from more extensive
research on 360 degree feedback. The
types of questions, the rating scales, how to determine the relevant
stakeholders, and how to present the resulting data were all discussed at the
meeting.
I then discussed a new committee that we gathered to address
the CGDC. A Strategic Working Group (SWG)
was created to consider a 5-year plan for the CGDC. The SWG has met once so far and will meet on
a fairly regular basis to discuss a variety of issues related to the CGDC work,
and develop a plan to continue this work.
A general list of the issues that the SWG considered is listed in the
presentation.
Finally, in order to keep the Advisory Committee informed
about the progress of the pilot and results of feedback surveys, etc., we will
be meeting on a quarterly basis. Our
next meeting will be in March 2014. At
that time, we will discuss some additional options for stakeholder feedback,
and we should have some results from the surveys of pilot participants and
their supervisors, as well as a few other topics. We’ll keep you posted on the date of that
meeting. Please join us if you can.