Educator Preparation

Candidate Assessment of Performance (CAP) Updates

To:Sponsoring Organizations with Teacher Preparation Programs
From:Elizabeth Losee, Assistant Director for Educator Preparation and Educator Assessment
Date:November 24, 2015
Dear Colleagues- In support of the work all of you are doing to successfully pilot CAP during the 2015-2016 academic year, we wanted to provide updates on the following:

CAP Office Hours Takeaways:

Learn more about what the major themes were across the different sessions, best practices that emerged and ESE's response, please see attached.

Updated CAP FAQ's:

In our effort to support the CAP 2015-16 Pilot and based on feedback and questions from the CAP Office Hours, we have update the CAP FAQ to provide clarifying answers to questions received from our teacher preparation programs and K-12 district colleagues, please see attached.

CAP Formative and Summative Assessment Rating Data Collection:

For the pilot, we will be collecting the formative and summative ratings for each candidate. Sponsoring Organizations will be responsible for completing the attached Excel file for all 2015-16 CAP Pilot participants. Please include all information for each Teacher Candidate that participated in the CAP pilot on the spreadsheet. We request one worksheet for all your candidates that participate in the pilot for fall and/or spring and one complete submission by May 30, 2016. If your organization is participating in the Online Platform pilot, we will not need you to complete the spreadsheet for your candidates, as we will be able to pull the ratings from the platform. We will include additional information in the Online Platform resources about this data extraction.

Feedback on the Pilot:

As we work to ensure a successful CAP implementation in 2016-17, we want to collect data and feedback from all of the CAP Pilot participants to inform the final CAP. We are doing this through:
  • Data collection of formative and summative assessment ratings (see above),
  • Surveys: In early December we will releasing a link to a feedback survey through email for you to send on to pilot participants (including program supervisors, supervising practitioners and candidates) within your Organization. We will rely on your support in distributing the survey and helping us to collect a robust set of feedback, and
  • Focus groups: In January we will be holding a series of focus groups to collect qualitative feedback on the pilot from fall CAP participants. We will be reaching out in December to solicit participation.

CAP Rubric & Ratings Workshop:

We will be releasing another set of training aides for Sponsoring Organizations to use in the training of your Program Supervisors and Supervising Practitioners on the use of the CAP rubric at the beginning of December.

Online Platform:

In December we will be launching the CAP Online Platform and releasing resources to support organizations in the pilot of this system for the spring semester. We appreciate all of the organizations that signed-up to pilot the new system, at this point we are at capacity for participation in the pilot. The features of the Online Platform that will support the implementation of the CAP include:
  • Use of a free web-based platform that includes access to all CAP forms,
  • Opportunity for completing, sharing, and accessing all forms and materials in real time,
  • Serving as a tool for interacting virtually throughout the 5-step cycle,
  • A communication window feature that allows for communication between the Program Supervisor, Supervising Practitioner and Teacher Candidate, and
  • Ability to extract assessment rating data—no additional step will be needed to send the ratings to ESE.
We appreciate your collective diligence in carrying out the pilot and partnership in the designing CAP to be a high-quality performance assessment. As always, if you have any questions, please email us at EdPrep@doe.mass.edu. Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,

The Educator Preparation Team



Last Updated: December 10, 2015