Teacher Incentive Allotment

TIA Spotlight: Garrison ISD (taken from the September 2024 TIA Newsletter)

This month we visited Garrison ISD for their exceptional appraisal practices as they implement their system. Garrison ISD, part of Region 7, is a rural district with three campuses – an elementary, middle, and high school. Their initial System Application was submitted in April of 2023, and they have just completed their Data Capture Year. The district will be submitting 49 teachers for a TIA designation.

Calibrating their Observations

Being a rural district with only one administrator per campus, Garrison ISD has six administrators who are T-TESS appraisers (each campus principal, director of curriculum and instruction, superintendent, and 504/testing coordinator). Their calibration process starts in early September.

• During the district’s beginning of the year in-service schedule, they dedicate a day for faculty training with a required T-TESS update breakout session for teachers and administrators. This allows all their staff to hear the same message about the T-TESS rubric and expectations of the district. This process has helped ensure their T-TESS data is aligned throughout the district.
• Next, they select a video from the EE PASS library (a free educator resources library for our districts) to use as the piece that appraisers will calibrate their TTESS scoring. They comb through the videos to find one that has a range of scoring on the rubric.
• The T-TESS appraisers watch the video on their own time and score domain 2 and 3 on a Google form. This allows for the appraisers to have some time to reflect on the video and scoring to simulate what they would do during an actual observation.
• Then they meet as an admin team to discuss the scoring for each dimension. After the discussion, they give the released T-TESS score for that dimension, and the discussion turns to why it was that rating. 
• After the initial calibration process, throughout the year, campus and district administrators do live calibration sessions during the walkthrough process. The goal during these sessions is to select one or two of the dimensions to focus on during that walkthrough. This allows for the discussion and calibration to go to a deeper level.
• To support professional development, the district has set data meetings with the admin team to analyze the observation data. Part of the discussion in the analyzation process is to determine what areas of the observation cycle needs to be addressed through professional development with teachers. This process will then be done through PLCs.

Addressing Skew Early and Often

Garrison ISD has an outlined plan to address skew in data early and often. By following this cycle of review, Garrison ISD’s skew declined, and they saw a significant decrease in skew by the end of the year.

• On a monthly basis, the administrator team analyzes walkthrough and observation data to determine if there is any skew within the data.
• If skew is discovered, they dive deeper to discuss and determine the reason for the skew.
• They follow with live calibration sessions with campus administrators focused on the reason discovered to ensure that their administrators are on the same page.

Side-by-Side Review of Teacher Observation and Student Growth Measures

Garrison ISD knows that teacher observation does not exist in a silo and outlined a plan to support analyzing their student growth data alongside their teacher observation data.

• The district has several student growth data points throughout the year, including MAP growth testing three times a year and six-week local assessments.
• They update that data and then correlate it to the teacher observation data.
• They have weekly administrator meetings, and once a month, they use the meeting as a data meeting to analyze that student growth data and discuss how to correlate it to the teacher observation data through both our local walkthrough process and formal observation data that has been compiled.

Addressing Challenges

We asked Garrison ISD’s TIA Lead, Scott Tyler, what challenges they may have faced as a smaller district implementing TIA. Scott said he felt the biggest challenge is the time and responsibility factor.

“For us to implement these practices, we just had to be very intentional about our time and focus. We look at our calendars in advance to plan out when we can do the collaborative walkthroughs. And of course, things come up to change those plans, but we ensure that we reschedule and find the time. We have the mind set as an admin team that this is important and when something is important, you find time for it.”

Regional ESC Support

ESC 7 supports the data management system in which they do their walkthrough and T-TESS observations. They provide professional development for both administration and faculty on using the data management system. In addition, their service center runs workshops and trainings which helps teachers and administrators know the correlation between the training and the T-TESS rubric.

Utilizing Tools to Enhance the Appraisal Process

The district says the most important tool in the appraisal process for them is the T-TESS rubric. During the first of the year in-service training, a T-TESS rubric is given to every teacher. During PLC and data meetings with teachers, campus and district administrators will refer to the T-TESS rubric. Now during these meetings, their teachers refer to the rubric throughout discussions.