STAGES, Supportive Tool for Assessing Growth in Educational Systems - is a comprehensive on-line tool for evaluating, reporting, and developing high quality educational systems, developed by Saginaw Valley State University.

Current climate, with its emphasis on accountability and scientifically based decision-making, places high demands on today’s schools. Meeting these challenges requires that we become forward thinking while still maintaining a solid grasp on where we are now. This revolutionary web-based program provides the link between record keeping, information reporting, and strategy development that has often been missing.

The comprehensive structure of STAGES allows for all stakeholders to assess professional practice in a secure environment while fostering substantive conversation between administrators, teachers, ancillary staff, and paraprofessionals. STAGES is designed as a growth assessment utilizing rubrics, observation, and self-reporting to provide performance descriptions for an individual, a building, or an entire district. This information can then be used to make decisions regarding professional development and school improvement.

An additional feature of the program is its ability to set different levels of expected proficiency for various employees, i.e. novice teachers may be expected to perform at least at a “developing” proficiency while experienced staff members are expected to fall within the “accomplished” category. With the push of a button administrators will be able to generate Individual Development Plans (IDPs) directly tailored to an individual based on his or her performance assessment.