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What is OPTIC?

The Online Platform for Teaching and Informed Calibration (OPTIC), is a professional development tool that supports Massachusetts educators to build a shared understanding of high-quality instruction and improve the feedback that teachers receive. Using video and interactive data displays, the platform provides educators with a dynamic calibration training experience aligned to the Standards of Effective Teaching Practice and the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. Ongoing, frequent calibration is essential to ensuring a meaningful, useful, and fair educator evaluation process grounded in high-quality feedback to teachers. OPTIC supports groups of educators to develop and refine common expectations for practice and feedback based on snapshots of instructional practice. PK-12 schools, districts, and educator preparation programs can use OPTIC to:

• Support evaluators, instructional coaches, teacher leaders, and other educators in their understanding of effective practice, standards-aligned instruction, and high quality feedback;
• Improve consistency within and across schools analyzing evidence and providing feedback;
• Reinforce priorities around effective practice and standards-aligned instruction within and across schools and alongside partners;
• And more!

Important note: This is not a tool or protocol for conducting actual observations or evaluations of teachers.  In the platform, participants “score” practice in order to discern differences in perceptions among observers and to engage in rich discussions of evidence. The platform is not intended to reinforce the act of scoring classroom observations, nor does DESE recommend providing an evaluation rating for a teacher based on a single observation. The goal of the platform is to help groups of observers work together to refine a common understanding of high quality practice and feedback, such that they can better identify effective instruction and support educators in their continual growth through high quality feedback. View Our Video: Get a glimpse of what OPTIC offers and hear fellow Massachusetts educators talk about how it can improve teaching and learning. Discover how OPTIC could benefit your school, district, or educator preparation program.

Transcript

• 0:06 Optic is the online platform for teaching and informed calibration.
• 0:10 It's a professional development tool that educators can use to hone their understanding of high quality teaching and learning.
• 0:17 I'm really excited about this new platform.
• 0:19 I see this online calibration platform as an opportunity to learn from my peers and calibrate with them.
• 0:25 I think calibration is really important for developing shared understanding so that every teacher at the school is experiencing feedback that is fair and is balanced with feedback that other teachers are getting.
• 0:39 It's about coming to a common understanding of what evidence we're looking for in observations, the type of feedback to provide to teachers and how to apply professional judgment in the evaluation process.
• 0:52 One of the things that the tool allows is that the calibration process feels really authentic, sitting in a room with other people who are watching the same tool, watching the same video and then taking that information and figuring out what we agreed on where we differ, how we differ.
• 1:10 Why we differ?
• 1:11 It really facilitates a really objective open conversation about practice and removes some of the risk generally involved with having these conversations with colleagues from a user perspective.
• 1:24 I found the tool very easy to use.
• 1:26 When I entered in, I was able to click on the video to watch it right there.
• 1:31 And then I was able to see very easily how to rate whether the teacher met the grade level expectations.
• 1:40 And then I just had to click next to write down my feedback.
• 1:44 If you've had really good experiences where people give you good feedback, you might have a good sense of what feedback should sound like.
• 1:50 But taking the opportunity to actually read other people's feedback, break it down into its component.
• 1:56 Arts analyze that for what it's trying to instill in a developing teacher.
• 2:01 I think it's really valuable.
• 2:02 Participants can view real time data displays of the scores provided in their group as well as compare across roles, compare with others in other districts or organizations in the state as a whole.
• 2:15 They can use this data to facilitate pretty rich conversations about perceptions of practice.
• 2:21 I think optic is so valuable because it is not only very user friendly, but it really broadens the network on conversations on teaching and learning.
• 2:35 Not only am I sitting around the table with educators that I see every day, but I'm able to compare that discussion to other people in the state and see what they are also seeing as good teaching and learning.
• 2:48 I really hope that districts start using this tool frequently.
• 2:52 It's not meant to be a one off professional development.
• 2:55 It should be an ongoing process.
• 2:57 I think there's a need for this calibration tool to allow educators to really pinpoint what it is that they're looking for when they go inside of a classroom and really define what really great teaching and learning looks like for our kids.
• 3:11 Our ultimate goal is for students to learn more.
• 3:14 It all goes back to the students.
• 3:16 When teachers across the school building have a consistent understanding of what high expectations look like.
• 3:22 Then students are much more likely to get a consistent experience of high expectations in all of their classrooms.

For more information, contact learnmore@teachforward.com