Litchfield school leaders unveil new educator evaluation framework, plan phased rollout next year

Litchfield Elementary School District leaders on Tuesday presented a draft educator evaluation framework they said is aligned to the district's learner and leader traits and designed to cascade from classroom staff to school and district leaders.

"We are really excited to be able to talk about the educator evaluation framework," Jennifer Benjamin, a member of the presentation team, told the Governing Board. Benjamin said the framework uses domains of communication, character, teamwork, problem solving, continuous learner and content expert and is intended to give educators clearer feedback and growth paths.

District staff showed a framework that links domains to indicators and role-based descriptors. Dr. Ducey said the content-expert domain will be differentiated by role so that, for example, reading specialists, math specialists and instructional coaches receive descriptors tailored to their work. "Content expert is about those observations of those best practices for instruction and then the rest of the domains are the evaluation of the employee to give them feedback on those domains," Ducey said.

The board heard that classroom observations and short walk-throughs will populate the content-expert evidence. Presenters said the LIFT walk-through form already in use shares the evaluation's language, and the district has documented more than 400 walk-throughs in its digital platform to date. "We have over 400 walk throughs documented across all of our schools," a presenter said.

The district will store evaluation forms, walk-throughs and uploaded artifacts in Classroom Mosaic, a digital platform the presenters described as the district's centralized home for evidence and ratings. "Classroom Mosaic is a digital platform that allows us to build all our forms... Now all of that is housed in Classroom Mosaic," a presenter said, and staff added Classroom Mosaic will include an internal AI search tool in January to help assemble artifacts for summative evaluations.

Student success will count for 33% of an educator's final rating via a growth coefficient, the presenters said. They told the board the growth coefficients were adjusted to set higher expectations but said the district tested scenarios with existing data before proposing the weighting. "That student success indicator in content expert that talks about the growth coefficient, that is 33% of the evaluation," a presenter said.

Presenters explained scoring and averaging: each descriptor is rated highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective; descriptor scores are averaged into domain scores, and the overall rating is calculated with the 33% student-success component. The district said the platform will perform the calculations and produce bands for "highly effective," "effective," "developing" and "ineffective."

Board members asked several operational questions about rollout and workload. Miss Moran said she supported raising expectations but asked the district to be clear with staff: "I fully support what you're doing, and I am glad that we're doing it," she said, while noting the shift will require training. Several board members suggested phasing components, scheduling time on early-release days for teachers to upload evidence and ensuring principals and evaluators receive calibration training.

Presenters described calibration steps already under way: district leaders said they have engaged a leader coach from Solution Tree and run principal PLC walks to align observation feedback. "We've actually had a leader coach from Solution Tree, Jane Ardell, come out, and she's been working with PLC groups of principals so that they are able to go into a classroom as an entire PLC," a presenter said.

District staff described next steps: complete an artifacts bank and glossary, finish role-differentiated content-expert descriptors (for reading/math specialists, transportation, maintenance and other classified roles), and return the final framework to the board for approval, expected in December. Implementation and training are planned for the following school year. Presenters said the evaluation will not be tied to performance-based pay.

The board took two formal votes unrelated to the evaluation presentation: it adopted the meeting agenda and approved the consent agenda at the start of the session, and it voted to adjourn at the end; both actions passed unanimously.

The presentation drew board support for clearer feedback and data-driven professional development, and district staff said they will continue refining descriptor language, evidence examples and training plans before full implementation next year.