Hello Measures Team-

Hope you all had a great week.  We had our weekly team leaders/Hope Street Group conference call Friday and wanted to provide some additional information.  We received a set of benchmarks to help keep us focused and progressing toward the September 14th target date that's quickly approaching.  You'll find this information listed on our main calendar.  Monday shows the goal for the week and Friday typically shows the action related.  These actions should be accomplished by Friday morning in order to be shared at the Friday afternoon conference call with HSG.  Please don't hesitate to call or email if you have any questions.

We also received a template to use when writing up our recommendations.  Please open the attachment below and read through the entire document- it provides a template as well as instructions and a sample policy recommendation.  Also, please keep in mind that along with all of these great discussions and questions about measures being posed by the group, we will need to keep track of our process. Notice the template requires that we note what led to the recommendation, ie major team discussion points, research, information about innovative practices.  We also need to keep in mind policy implications and implementation steps for the recommendation.  It may be extremely helpful to begin using this template along with our discussions over the next two weeks.

For this week...we really need to get those discussions on the question sets moving!  Please add to the discussion threads as often as possible.  We realize what a busy (understatement) time of year this is for many of us, but the countdown to Sept 14th has begun!  The goal set for our team by HSG of narrowing down our discussions and "providing recommendations that would be pivotal and essential to building effective teacher evaluation systems" is attainable, but only with full team participation!

We haven't been able to reach everyone by phone yet, but hope to have heard actual live voices by the end of today.  We'd like to "meet" you and get a gauge of where you are with your discussion questions and any questions you might have about the process.  We will also continue collecting schedule information so that we can begin coordinating conference calls for the team.

Thanks so much- Darcy and Dina