Happy Holidays & Update!

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.