Our Stories | facylitate

Facylitate Stories

Our Successes

TELL US YOUR STORY:

School Principal

You know that it takes trust to help teachers improve their practice and let's face it, you need great teachers to get great outcomes for your students.

Shifting Teacher Practice - An inquiry approach

We brough in Facylitate to support teacher evaluation in our school. Using an inquiry lens a team of school administrators and teachers created a focus group of teachers and committed to observing them weekly using a sub-section of our teacher evaluation form. We used the heat-maps to review aggregate teacher performance and created our professional learning to support our teachers. At each professional learning session we shared the charts of aggregated teacher performance as the purpose driving the PD we were engaged in.

The results were amazing. Over very short 3 - 4 week cycles we were able to realize outsized improvements in teacher performance. Additionally, we saw this improvement across the school community during our regular rounds of teacher observations.

I think transparently sharing teacher performance before, during and after PD sessions help build trust with our teachers. They were able to understand why we chose the topics we did and were able to take pride in their improvements when we were able to point to them and make the clear connection between the learning and the practice.

NM, Principal

Assistant Principal

OR WRITE TO US:
Facylitate@facylitate.com

Facylitate Note helps school leaders capture accurate low inference notes using clicks on the page and shortcuts to allow leaders to capture the rapid action that occurs in our classrooms. We used machine learning to analyze observation reports and extracted a series of keywords often used to describe practices in the classroom.

Class is over? Press sync and have your observation ready to email directly to the teacher or onto our servers for analysis and strongly aligned recommendations from our library of resources.

Wondering how teachers are improving over time?

Look at our analytical charts to show teachers how they have grown and the correlation between the supports you offered and their ability to improve their craft.

To build trust, teachers need to believe their leaders can offer strong effective and practical support. We draw on the theories of adult learning to make our processes practical and relevant for the teachers and school administrators.

Supporting Assistant Principals

I am an instructional leader but I am also an English Language Learner. I feel very comfortable holding post-observation conferences with my teachers but sometimes I am cautious about how I write my reports. The resource library in Facylitate give me key language and vocabulary to support my report writing.

Coach/Consultant

Supporting Coaches and improving instruction

When I start my work as a coach in a new school I go through the building with the school leaders to learn about the current state of teacher practice. Facylitate helps me record how teachers are doing. The instructional leaders and I meet to review teacher performance and design our instructional focus for the school year.

Thoughout the year I use Facylitate to record my classroom observation and the coaching I do with a teacher. The principal also compares my findings with the findings that building leaders are recording. When necessary we engage in learning walks to norm our understanding of teacher performance.

At the end of the year, I am able to quickly review analytical charts with the principal to demonstrate the progress teachers have made and prepare the arc of learning for the next school year.

Ed Evaluator

Monitoring Student Behavior

I enjoy my work with students confident that I can support them in getting the services they need to advance.

One of my tasks is supporting the school with Functional Behavior Analysis. I was surprised when my principal suggested I use a teacher observation tool for students but he showed me how Facylitate Note works.

Its really straightforward. I create an observation and by tapping on the student I am observing and a selection from a list of actions the student might do I can keep up with all the actions I am trying to record. The report time stamps and counts all my students' actions and also allows me to see who interacted with the student so that I may be able to find the actions that may be triggering my subject.

Facylitate has improve my report writing and my ability to take notes in the class.