You may have seen the communication in this week’s Teacher Connect about the Instructional Framework Advisory Group. We wanted to share some more information with you and encourage you to share your input with our district leadership.

As with everything else, our message to senior district leadership around the Instructional Framework Development has been that teachers must be involved as full participants with agency to make decisions and shape final outcomes. When we were asked to nominate only 8 teachers for an advisory group to represent the diversity of our over 4,000 members we declined to participate in such a flawed process. Fortunately, the outcome of this was an open and honest discussion between PPS and PAT leadership about what it means to collaborate and how we can support each other to work together towards shared goals for our students.

The practical results are as follows:

• On April 19, PPS Leadership emailed all teachers directly to ask for participants for an advisory group
• Over 100 teachers indicated interest and 25 were invited to join the advisory group. There is also a group of 13 TOSAs and Mentor Teachers who were invited by their department heads to join.
• To provide district-wide transparency, PPS Senior Leadership willingly agreed to:
  •  Share the names and roles of everyone on the core design team and also a summary of the work that has already been done. You can find that information here.
  • Create a google site with all documents, meeting materials, and recordings of meetings for the Advisory Group. In addition, every page on this site has a feedback form linked at the bottom and there is an FAQ which will be regularly updated.
  • Send weekly updates in Admin Connect and Teacher Connect which will also contain a link to the feedback form.

We have also shared our concerns about The New Teacher Project (TNTP) – both about the organization’s ties to corporate ed reformers and the fact that they’re outside contractors who have been hired during a time when schools are losing teaching positions. This remains an area where we do not see eye-to-eye.

Again, we encourage all members to share questions, ideas, experiences, and whatever else might help inform decisions about the development of the Instructional Framework via the pathways indicated above.