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Case Studies
Evaluation Portal for Trade Union Improves Teacher Evaluation Process
Project At a Glance |
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RDA developed a collaborative portal to be used by educators and community members as part of a comprehensive teacher development and evaluation system. |
About Our Client
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is a trade union representing workers in education, health care, and public service. The federation provides services to local members throughout the country, and works to proactively influence governmental policies regarding education.
Background
One of several critical factors that impact student outcomes in school is the effectiveness of teachers. The AFT is interested in developing a portal to support local members and help districts better develop and evaluate teachers. AFT feels that this portal is crucial in helping local leaders, members and other education stakeholders understand how to reform teacher development and evaluation in their school districts. The central element of the portal will be the AFT developed framework for A Continuous Improvement Model for Teacher Development and Evaluation.
Among many other things, this portal will serve as a resource to help AFT locals and districts acquire grants under the U.S. government's "Race To the Top" program, which allocates funds to states that create conditions for education innovation and reform that achieve significant improvements in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, and improving high school graduation rates.
Solution Detail
RDA developed a collaborative portal to be used by union leaders, educators, and education stakeholders as part of a comprehensive teacher development and evaluation system. The portal, which highlights the features of the AFT framework, allows AFT employees to develop and publish content to the extranet site. This content is in the form of documents and templates as well as a series of HTML content pages. Keywords and categories can be assigned to each piece of content to provide effective categorization.
RDA worked with AFT to develop a branding concept that fits within the current branding standards while providing a unique and uniform look and feel to the pages. Publishing templates were created that allow AFT content owners to create new pages that adhere to these branding standards without having to write code for each page.
RDA integrated a message board and calendar to facilitate communication with the user community beyond the provided content. Users are required to log in to the site through a secure form and their username and password are validated against an existing AFT database before access is granted to the SharePoint platform.
Classified content is highlighted through a series of web parts on the site pages that allow AFT page designers to associate documents to an HTML page or feature document categories on the site home page. This allows the AFT team to have full control over the site and content display without having to recode the pages.
Benefits
The ability to integrate the community will be key in taking a proactive step to influencing teacher development and evaluation. Implementing a fair, valid and reliable system will benefit AFT members as well as the children they teach for years to come. Adding external parties, those that are not on the AFT network, to the site provided real value for the collaboration effort.
Users are able to be gain secure access to AFT content based on membership in a varied set of roles. Each role provides an additional level of content, but all users are able to participate. The ability for users to collaborate through document sharing, discussion and notification of events provides a central point to move the AFT framework forward.
Technically Speaking
RDA leveraged Microsoft Office SharePoint Server publishing components, web parts and third party components to provide a secure extranet collaboration environment. RDA used the built-in ability to easily extend the SharePoint authentication mechanism to provide an economical yet effective solution for external partner interaction at AFT.
