The Pennsylvania’s ESEA waiver approval was dependent upon PDE making minor modifications to the SLO templates for teachers and principals.

Specifically, PDE is required to demonstrate that Pennsylvania’s teacher and principal evaluation systems differentiate among teachers and principals who make significantly different contributions to growth in student learning and that 1) “the rating systems consider prior student performance by classroom in setting targets; and (2) include safeguards to ensure that teachers are not disadvantaged based on students’ prior academic performance” (Pennsylvania ESEA Waiver, 2015). The USDE defines growth as performance of students between two or more points in time.

In order to comply with this federal mandate, PDE has modified the respective templates to emphasize the need for a growth SLO (see links below). PDE recognizes that many LEAs have already had their educators develop SLOs for the 2015-2016 school year and that some of those SLOs might be mastery based and set against benchmark targets. In such cases, PDE would encourage LEAs to reconsider these mastery goals and revise the SLO to demonstrate growth.

For example:

1) What data was used to inform the mastery based SLO?

2) Was the SLO calculated to take into account students’ prior academic performance? If so, reflect the baseline data in your SLO.

In the near future, PDE will conduct a statewide webinar regarding all of the ESEA waiver requirements. However, given the time sensitive nature of SLO development for the 2015-2016 school year, IUs have been asked to disseminate the revised templates to the field now.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVE (SLO) PROCESS TEMPLATE

Elective Data / SLO Template for Principals/School Leaders
Elective Data / SLO Template for Principals/School LeadersGuiding Questions