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.

The 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.

Purpose

In the age of accountability brought about by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, educational systems experienced an unprecedented degree of scrutiny.   By law decisions regarding program offerings, service provisions, and educational opportunities must be substantiated by information from various evaluative sources.  Many educational systems struggled to equip themselves with the tools to facilitate data-driven decision making.  STAGES was developed with this need in mind, thereby functioning as the link between record keeping, information reporting, and strategy development.

While operating as a means to make data-driven decisions, STAGES also offers a unique perspective on the concept of evaluation.  The instrument used for assessment is designed on a developmental continuum which allows participants to receive an accurate account of their current professional practice while casting the vision for the attaining the next stage of proficiency.  Administrators and teachers can then participate in substantive conversations regarding goal setting and objectives for professional growth.  In this way, STAGES focuses on assessment for the purpose of supportive development.

Design

The comprehensive design of STAGES allows for information to be gathered, stored, and retrieved in purposeful ways which fuel decisions regarding tenure awards, professional development, and school improvement.

Through maintaining various levels of access to the system, STAGES provides a comprehensive structure supporting all stakeholders.  Superintendents are offered the highest level of access with admittance into all employee records, teacher evaluations, individual performance totals, building totals, and district totals.  Building principals have access to teachers on their staffs and can compare their building performance total with the entire district while classroom teachers are able to see their own records and evaluations.  Each individual assessed within the STAGES program has the ability to perform a self-assessment with the rubrics assigned to his or her role within the district.

In addition to generating reports regarding employee performance, STAGES is designed to perform myriad data analyses.   Queries can be made from any element in an employee profile.  For example, a principal could view the differences among first grade teachers and fifth grade teachers in “Teacher Interaction with Students” or the variances among the performance totals for the math department at one high school with the math department at another.