The GSTEP Principles and Framework for Accomplished Teaching: Making History

In GSTEP, work is done collaboratively across partners, and participants seek input from a wide range of stakeholders. Hundreds of people in Georgia helped to develop the GSTEP Principles and Framework for Accomplished Teaching. This single document—and the many projects built upon it—may be the major legacy of GSTEP in Georgia. In this final issue of the GSTEP Newsletter, we look back over the history of the Framework as it is about to be adopted statewide as a common set of integrated standards that will support teachers across a career continuum. Download the Framework for Accomplished Teaching (PDF).

Beginnings and Explorations: Finding our Path

GSTEP defined induction broadly, so as to merge preservice preparation and inservice support as a coherent experience stretching from the day someone decided to become a teacher through at least the second year of teaching. The three induction teams were charged with exploring ways to promote such integration, creating a seamless teacher preparation program that supported teachers in their passage from the university environment to the classroom and school environment.

Focus Groups: Round 1. In the spring of 2001, the three induction teams examined the literature in induction including several states’ induction. In an intensive two-day workshop, team members studied existing induction models. To understand how our diverse constituents would perceive our findings, we met with focus groups comprised of over 300 educators, including beginning teachers, to decide how to proceed.

After conducting these focus groups, 20 GSTEP leaders—both P-12 and university members of induction teams—met for a day. In small groups, they shared and analyzed their collected focus group data, seeking patterns and themes across the data. Several principles for the development of an induction program emerged. They believed that “a framework that (1) articulated the work of teaching and (2) could be agreed upon by all stakeholders could provide a focal point for developing a coherent induction support program from freshman year of college through the teaching career” (GSTEP Report, 2002).

Development of the Principles and Framework. With a challenge grant from the University System of Georgia Board of Regents, a team of 14 writers met for three days in May 2001 to devise a plan based on the literature, focus group insights, and their own experience and expertise. This group first constructed principles to guide the development of a framework, based on the results of the earlier meeting. These GSTEP Principles continue to drive the work of GSTEP (See www.coe.uga.edu/gstep/documents/).

Secondly, the team identified elements of quality teaching based on the many materials we had reviewed. The team infused student learning throughout the elements and the indicators and descriptors that followed. All three (technology, diversity, and student learning), we believed, are essential in any evidence-based claims for quality teaching. The document that emerged included six elements: Content and Curriculum, Knowledge of Students and their Learning, Learning Environments, Planning and Instruction, Assessment, and Professionalism.
After further review and revision, an initial GSTEP Framework and the GSTEP Induction Principles were made available for input from across the state.

Focus Groups: Round 2. In the fall of 2001, we arranged a second round of focus groups to critique the Principles and Framework. All three institutions conducted focus groups between late September 2001 and early April 2002. Overall, over 400 individuals participated in nearly 60 focus groups. Across all groups, there was a high degree of support for the idea of a framework to guide induction, along with a good deal of concern: first that such a framework could become a mode of summative evaluation rather than remaining a teacher-directed professional development tool, and secondly, that the framework was so highly detailed as to seem overwhelming, even to highly accomplished teachers. Based on these findings, a revision team reduced the 12- page document to two pages and six elements. The GSTEP Framework for Accomplished Teaching was then ready to be used.

Uses of the Framework in University and School Settings

In the 2001 GSTEP report, three purposes for the Framework were established, which, in retrospect, are telling. The purposes were “to capture the heart of recent work identifying the knowledge, skills, dispositions, understandings, and other attributes of exemplary teaching”; to serve as a “guide to increased proficiency in each identified element”; and to become “a compilation of resources one can mobilize to achieve that increased proficiency.” From 2002 to the present, faculty members in all three universities are using the GSTEP Framework for NCATE, to examine their own teaching, to guide preservice teachers, and to develop and pilot various instruments for observations and self-assessment.

As early as 2001, the GSTEP Framework was envisioned as the basis for a “web-based resource bank developed for teachers at ASU, VSU, and UGA and in the state of Georgia, though it will be available to all interested educators…. [The online framework will] provide access to a myriad of resources…that teachers and their mentors or supervisors can access in order to develop teacher-driven, next-step, professional development plans across their careers” (GSTEP Annual Report, 2001). In 2002, the GSTEP BRIDGE (www.teachersbridge.org) was developed as an outgrowth of the VSU Teacher Resource Bank and now organized by the GSTEP Framework.

As state agendas move toward supporting teacher quality, GSTEP has the products and processes available to meet identified needs. In May 2005, a subcommittee of the state’s Committee on Quality Teaching met to plan their shared strategy to develop integrated performance standards for teacher preparation, certification, and teacher renewal. The goal of this standard is that “performance standards will be seamlessly aligned through the career continuum from teacher preparation through the first years in the classroom through ongoing career growth.” Unanimously, these representatives of the Board Of Regents, Professional Standards Commission, Department of Education, and professional organizations agreed to forward the GSTEP Framework as this set of standards. Further work will be done, but the hope is there that the collaborative efforts of GSTEP partners and stakeholders indeed have created their vision for Georgia: to create coherent support from the decision to teach through the second year of teaching and beyond. It will take all of us to bring this potential to life.

—Sally Ross