Back to top
Blog

Napa Valley Schools: Take the Dread out of Collecting Teacher Feedback

Topics: 
Product

Let’s say you have 4,000 English Learners in your district. After spending weeks pulling together data to track which students are ready to be reclassified, you finally identify 1,242 students that might be - cross your fingers - ready to exit the program. Since you need to collect teacher input from both the Homeroom and ELA/ELD teacher of every middle and high school student, you'll need to print, distribute and collect a lot of forms - 1,863 forms to be exact.

NapaValleyMathProblem.jpgOverwhelmed? If so, you’re not alone. Many districts in California, including Napa Valley Schools, can relate.

“Prior to Ellevation, we spent most of our time pulling together the data and crossing items off our compliance check list,” says Ivan Chaidez, Executive Director of Napa Valley USD.

Napa invested time and energy into understanding what makes an EL ready to exit their program. Prior to Ellevation, this process was “all hands on deck” with manual data pulls, cumbersome excel functions, and days spent tracking down Teacher Input Forms. Napa Valley didn’t have a fool-proof system to collect RFEP monitoring forms and often had to rely on the word of site administrators.

“We didn’t have time to sift through 800 reports to see if teachers were monitoring our former ELs appropriately, or even if teachers were monitoring at all!” says Sarah Williams, Director of Assessment, Achievement and English Learner Services at Napa Valley.

When it came time to finding a technology solution that would address their EL program pain points, Ellevation was the obvious choice.

“Ellevation allows me to easily distribute and collect teacher input forms online, giving me a direct line  of communication to classroom teachers without having to rely on Principals or APs,” says Sarah. “Now we’re able to quickly access our student information, along with their data, and have a more meaningful conversation about what to do next.”

And that’s not all. Napa Valley also uses Ellevation to identify what’s working with ELs for the benefit of all students.

“We often think about our EL program as helping the canaries in the coal mine, meaning that if our ELs are doing well, then our instruction for all students is good,” says Sarah. “We use Ellevation to find sites where ELs are progressing, capture that school’s best instructional practices, and duplicate the findings across the district.”

Your reclassification and RFEP monitoring numbers may not match those of the district in our fictional scenario, but we know how time consuming and challenging it can be to manage it all, regardless of how many ELLs you serve. Let us help!

For starters, check out these teacher feedback tips and download editable RFEP Monitoring and Teacher Input Forms.