What you need to know about Student Learning Targets (from the Louisiana Federation of Teachers)
Student Learning Targets (SLTs) are a crucial part of a teacher’s COMPASS evaluation. To make sure that your evaluation is an appropriate, accurate and fair representation of your professional abilities, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers offers the following hints for writing your SLTs in collaboration with your principal.
Student Learning Target tips:
- Set reasonable, realistic targets.
- Consider including the stipulation that only the scores of students who took both the pre and post assessments will be included in the calculation.
- You might stipulate that a certain attendance factor will determine if a student remains in the SLT group. Refer to language for attendance requirements for updating students in CVR. The same rules should apply when writing SLTs.
- Students with high scores on the pre-assessment instrument may not be capable of achieving their targeted growth. Consider excluding those students from your group.
- SLTs should be written only for the students you teach, based on their specific past performance and pre-assessment data. Do not base them on the performance of the students in the entire school or school district.
- SLTs are intended to be a comparison of where your students were at the beginning of the year and how much they have progressed during the year, based on your teaching, just as a VAM score is based on the progress of only your students.
- Share your SLT drafts with your peers for wording and math calculations.
- Monitor and record student performance throughout the year.
- At midyear, check to see if you are eligible to make changes to your SLTs.
To understand more about what needs to be included in your Student Learning Targets, check out the SLT cheat sheet here.
A more complete list of tips to survive COMPASS, assist with your classroom observations and Value Added Model evaluations, please click here.
These resources and more are available on the LFT’s Back-to-School resources page – click here for access.
Setting Student Goals (PDF): SettingStudentGoals LDOE