New DISD Teacher Pay For Performance Plan

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DALLAS (CBS11) - Teaching the teachers--that's the next step as DISD hands scorecards to its educators.

According to the district, roughly 71% of eligible teachers will get pay raises next month as part of a new pay for performance plan called the Teacher Excellence Initiative.

But, what about the teachers that came up short? Excellence doesn't happen by accident. So as the district sets a goal of putting an effective teacher in every classroom—it's not just the students who must continue to learn.

"Our teachers are working just as hard as these students—if not harder!" insists Jenny Christian, DISD's STEM Science Director. "They take their jobs seriously… they chose this to motivate and reach students and they need the support to do that."

Christian is a former classroom teacher now working to support the district's professional development goals. Often that means mining the data to determine why students are coming up short—and then helping the teachers adapt.

"To say that a teacher only needs to know their content, that is only one small portion of what being a teacher is about," says Christian, "you can be a physics genius, but, if you don't know how to deliver that lesson to all of your learners… so they can succeed, then we're here to support those teachers."

As the district now ties teacher pay to student performance, the stakes at the campus level are high.

"Under the old system that the state used, we had about 97% of our teachers were scoring proficient or above," says Lindsay Coshatt, the director of DISD's Teacher Excellence Initiative. "And yet we know not all of our students were excelling."

So to win, there must be a plan…and coaches to help execute. So the coaches are getting extra training now. The instructional coaches will take what they learn here back to the campus level to support teachers in developing new ways to reach those struggling learners.

"If you have students who learn by hearing things, they're auditory learners," says Christian, "then, if a teacher learns how to modify components of their lesson so they can meet that student's needs? That's what teaching is about."

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