STaR Chart- Opinion Piece

The STaR Chart is composed four areas: Teaching and Learning; Educator Preparation and Development; Leadership, Administration and Instructional Support; and Infrastructure for Technology. According is our results from the past three reporting periods, Teaching and Learning has been our campus lowest area so I will be focusing on this area.

Teaching and Learning consists of the following components: Patterns in the classroom use, Frequency/design of instructional setting, content area connections, technology applications (TA) TEKS being implemented, student mastery of the TA TEKS, and online learning. Since we will be looking at the 2007-2008 Statewide Summary, I will use our district 2007-2008 STaR Chart for comparison. In that year, our total was a score of 13, which was the highest of all three reports. We scored a 2 all the way across and in TL 5 we received a 3. However, in all years we have been classified as “Developing Tech.” The Campus Statewide Summary indicates that 3.9% were Early Tech, 69.7% were Developing Tech, 25.5% were Advanced Tech, and 0.9% were Target Tech. It seems that we fell in the normal trend that year to be classified as “Developing Tech.” Some recommendations for improvement is to include a column in the teachers lesson plan template requesting them to complete a section indicating what technology will be used to target the TL2 objective. We can also be providing constructive feedback and modeling to teachers how others are using technology in their classrooms because some teacher will use technology, but will only use it one and also provide data so that they can understand the rationale.