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Executive Summary Please provide a brief overview of the school district's proposed TLC plan. This summary should highlight your vision and goals and describe how the primary components of the plan connect to one another. (5,000 characters maximum) Wapsie Valley Schools utilized our School Improvement Advisory Committee to develop our teacher leader framework. The SIAC committee consists of staff members, parents, students and administrators. This committee carefully considered existing work and priorities in our system along with the Department of Education’s theory of action and initiative goals when describing the responsibilities of various levels of teacher leadership in our plan. Wapsie Valley Schools has four goals for the teacher leader proposal. Goal 1: Build the professional capacity of teacher leaders to aid in the development, delivery, and evaluation of professional learning in the district. Goal 2: Build system capacity to meet our mission: Guaranteed learning for every student. More effectively target the learning needs of each student. Base system, building and individual student decisions on evidence of learning. Goal 3: Provide greater support for the system’s collaborative culture. Goal 4: Provide a supportive network for teachers new to our system and to the profession. As we developed our plan, we utilized a worksheet to ensure that we connected our teacher leadership planning to district priorities and values. That worksheet asked members of the committee to connect learning or critical plan considerations to several foundational elements: the Iowa Core, Iowa Vision for TLC Plans, 2013-2014 SIAC recommendations, assessment and feedback, administrative team “tight” concepts (such as collaborative philosophy, PLC framework, and systems approach), the district’s core instructional values, professional learning communities, and the district mission statement: Guaranteed learning for every student. The teacher leadership layers represent support for the system through a building leadership team, for collaborative teams in our district through a collaborative coach, for individual teachers through the mentor and new professional plan, and to individual students through the intervention coach: system, team, teacher, and student focused support. The district places high value on meeting our mission--Guaranteed learning for every student--and on core instructional values that we believe describe good teaching and learning no matter the building, classroom, content area, or grade level. Those core instructional values are: Through a collaborative environment, we: Focus on learning. • Communicate clear learning targets. • Provide timely feedback based on evidence of learning. • Ensure a responsive system based on results. • The collaborative coach will focus on developing skills required to continue to develop our professional learning communities. Using the Critical Issues for Team Consideration document (provided by Solution Tree), collaborative team coaches will help teams set goals to improve their capacity as a PLC, coach teams to improve in targeted areas, and develop support structures to facilitate more consistent and intentional collaborative time (i.e. virtual meetings, sharing and reviewing of data through technology, et cetera). This intervention coach will work closely with the collaborative coach, BLT, and administrative team to provide support to district teachers in the area of development, implementation, and analysis of impact of learning intervention for teams of teachers and individual teachers. This teacher leader will work to improve district capacity to target intervention in learning to the district established “I Can” statements. The building leadership team will provide leadership at the system level, based, in part, on feedback from our collaborative and intervention coach about the work of our teacher teams and the impact our instruction is having on student learning. The BLT will focus on evidence of system progress, and based on that evidence, evaluate professional learning experiences in the district, design professional learning experiences for our staff, and partner with district administrators to deliver that professional learning. Work that focuses on current district work in unit planning, proficiency scales, feedback and assessment, progress monitoring, and “I Can” statements will continue, with the BLT monitoring the impact the professional development is having on instruction and the impact instruction is having on learning. Teachers new to the profession and to the district will need significant support entering the field, and building capacity to plan units, develop proficiency scales, target instruction to “I Cans,” intervene in learning, and monitor progress in our system. With that need for support in mind, new professionals will be supported by a mentor. That partnership will be afforded additional contract days, in addition to 36 days throughout the year to work together, modeling, co-teaching, or observing one another. This additional support will better enable new professionals to feel supported in a new environment. These teacher leadership roles will improve the district’s ability to increase the professional capacity of our staff, and in doing so, to meet our mission. The collaborative and intervention coaches perspective will connect to the building leadership team’s interest in the success of the system, and the mentors will be critical in the induction of new teachers to the instructional expectations of our system. This teacher leader framework focuses support on our system, our teams, our individual teachers, and our students. The Wapsie Valley School Board approved the plan on October 30, 2014. Please select the TLC model number that most closely resembles your district plan. TLC Model Number Model 3 Comparable Plan