Accountability Model

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How We Ensure Teacher Effectiveness

The Urban Teacher Center (UTC) evaluates its residents in three main areas: Content and pedagogical knowledge, clinical practice, and student achievement. Participants must meet UTC standards in all three areas in order to remain in good standing with the program. If participants do not meet the standards in any one of these areas, regardless of their proficiency in others, they will be dismissed from the program.

Content and Pedagogical Knowledge

• UTC selects candidates with a history of strong academic ability and who have passed the Praxis I exam.
• Within the first two years of the program, candidates participate in a series of modules/courses that are grounded in content and pedagogy, and are residentially tied to their clinical experience within a school. 
• Residents must maintain at least a 3.0 GPA and cannot receive a grade below a C-.
• Residents must pass the appropriate Praxis II series exams in their content area by the end of their first year.

Clinical Practice

• Residents must demonstrate effective clinical practice as measured by a valid observational rubric that reflects UTC’s core skills and practices that every effective teacher should be exhibiting in the classroom.
• In their first year, residents must score above a minimum standard that reflects emerging competence.
• During each subsequent year, residents are expected to score higher on this rubric, moving from emerging competence to effective teacher. Minimum scores will be set by UTC as a baseline for each year and residents must score above the minimum yearly standard.

Student Achievement

• Mid-way through their first year, residents are assigned a small group of six to eight students and will work with them for approximately five months to increase their particular content skills in either math or literacy.
• During years two and three, residents are teachers of record. Their students are administered a pre-test at the beginning of the school year and a post-test at the end of the school year to determine academic improvement. Student must improve an average of one school year grade equivalency by the end of the year.
• If residents’ students do not achieve adequate academic improvement, residents are given the opportunity for another year of data collection in which their students will be assessed on pre and post-test measures.
• Students are assessed on pre and post-tests using parallel forms of a nationally normed assessment and must show growth. 
• Residents will not administer the tests to their own students, eliminating the potential for any bias in the testing procedure.