by Dr. Julie Crain and Andromachi Fragkou

Professional development

Professional Development And Evaluation Coming Of Age At ACS Athens

by Dr. Julie Crain, Coordinator of Professional Development and Andromachi Fragkou, Director of Services and Employee Development (K-12)

Reflection has always been a huge part of the review and evaluation process at ACS Athens, more so for faculty but also for staff. Since the 1970s, ACS Athens had various reflective summaries and rubrics, but none tied directly to the employee’s professional development or tied to metrics overall for evaluation. Over the past two years, the Professional Development Team’s goals were to connect employees’ goals to professional development, craft a competency-driven evaluation plan, add protocols, and draft an evaluation guide specifically for faculty and an additional guide for staff.

Professional Development

The PD Request Process now focuses on individual goals and meeting those goals that advance the employee and the institution. The supervisor guides the employee in connection with professional development, desired or prescribed, to goals and improvement in the Individual Professional Development Plan, IPDP, required of all ACS Athens Members. As an educational institution, we work to keep our members up to date with the best practices in the pertinent fields that come together to improve ACS Athens; fields such as teaching, learning, technology, legal, business, facility management, conscious citizenship, health, research, recruitment, safety, activities, artificial intelligence, meta-verse, fundraising, the environment, etc.

Typically, as conscientious professionals at ACS Athens, we keep up with changes and improvements in our fields through professional listservs or subscriptions to specific online journals and member organizations. When we need additional, specific training, we might reach out to our PD Team for ideas or online resources.

As in all fields, teaching and learning have changed in the last 2-5 years, and so has employee learning. Gone are the days of ‘going’ somewhere for a PD session, or ‘sitting and getting.’ This is evident in our change in the philosophy of our weekly PD choices and offerings and our connection of Action Research to overall professional development for faculty and staff. Like we empower our students to be Architects of Their Own Learning, so goes it for our ACS Athens Members. As we teach our students to meet and exceed competencies, so goes it for our Members.

Similar to best practices in the classroom, best practices for adult PD involve interaction; mostly online learning or a blended approach; sharing PD with others in the same field within the institution, and application of learning back into the work environment in a timely fashion. This is the model of best practices at ACS Athens for Professional Development that we attempt to follow every day.

Competency-Driven Evaluation Plans

The Principals began this process of developing an overall evaluation plan in 2019 with the direction of President Pelonis and the help of the Dean of Academics, Julia Tokatlidou. As is seemingly tradition at ACS Athens, we like to ‘grow our own’ policies based on best practices but with heavy input and consensus from our stakeholders. Such is the case with the 2022 Review and Evaluation Processes at ACS Athens. Hours of research into best practices, open sources of evaluation plans, discussions with similar institution leaders, and expert knowledge from current ACS Athens leaders led to a draft of competencies and growth scale scrutinized and edited by the faculty in the spring of 2021. With that faculty input, the first version of the Professional Review and Evaluation Process, PREP, was implemented in the fall of 2021. Feedback from faculty and principals led to the updated version for fall 2022.

Part of the review process for faculty is the supervisor Walk-Through. In addition to formal, preplanned evaluation of teaching, the supervisor also walks through the classroom and uses a digital form to note teaching practices. These ‘snapshots’, are additional elements the supervisor can use to keep informed about the practices, competencies, and growth that they see within the teaching environment.

Concurrently, Ms. Fragkou and Dr. Crain were also working on the draft of the staff version of the review and evaluation process. Similar to the creation of the faculty version, best practices in the field were reviewed and taken into consideration to craft a ‘home-grown’ model for ACS Athens. In the spring of 2022, the draft of the Professional Review and Evaluation Model, PREM, was presented to the staff leaders, who added their input to the plan. After training for all staff, there was a ‘soft’ roll-out of the PREM in the spring of 2022. The plan will be fully implemented in fall 2022 and revised for fall 2023 after data and feedback are reviewed.

It could be that we transition our plans to a purchased electronic source, or we are able to find inhouse solutions that digitize our information and data to meet our needs. We are continuing to investigate these options as we begin the second year of the formal process for faculty, and the first formal year for staff connecting our ACS Athens’ Members learning with goals, reflection, best practices, and data compilation for informed leadership.