Collecting Quality Teacher Input: Creating a System for Efficient and Meaningful Sharing

Without teacher input, Evaluation Team Reports (ETRs) can become a tangled web of standard scores, percentiles, and provide an inadequate representation of the whole student. Teachers who provide information for the ETR “round out” the profile of the student. They are able to discuss what the student is like in the classroom on a consistent basis, describe how they are performing compared to their peers in the classroom, and share longitudinal data to express how the student has progressed. Perhaps the key letter in the acronym ETR is the letter T for Team. The teachers are valuable members to the special education eligibility decision making team. Without them, school psychologists would only have snapshots of a student’s abilities. The current Change Project was developed to make an existing system of collecting teacher input more efficient while still providing a thorough representation of the student.