The A. Philip Randolph School (APRCHS), located in Harlem, was founded in 1979 as an educational collaboration between the New York City Department of Education and the City College of New York.
The school serves over a thousand students in grades 9-12, with a mission to provide the highest quality education to public high school students in order to give them the skills and experiences necessary to prepare graduates to succeed at competitive colleges and universities.
We’re an early adopter of TeachBoost. We love it. It helps to solidify some of the subjective. I can’t imagine doing observations and evaluations without it.
Get in touch →As one of the bigger schools in Manhattan, APRCHS wanted a way to streamline their observation process in a way that also works well with the Advance Web Application (AWA) data entry system required by the New York City Department of Education and the Danielson Framework.
Legal pads and Word documents were not sufficient to keep up with the multiple cycles and over 300 observations a year, so in 2013 they selected TeachBoost to reduce redundancy and put all of the data into one platform.
The APRCHS leadership team is large, with many different people conducting walkthroughs across a week. Principal David Fanning shared, "We needed to stop all the traffic jams and avoid doing double work related to classroom walkthroughs and year-end evaluations. Now we're able to stay focused on instructional expectations and excellence."
"With Teachboost's data capabilities, we can view trends across grade-levels more easily and identify areas for improvement," Fanning shared. "One thing that emerged our first year using TeachBoost was that our teachers were struggling with 3B in the Danielson Framework—using questioning and discussion techniques—so our coaches were able to provide space for teachers to practice and get feedback."
We were spending countless hours scripting classroom observations by hand and then moving them into various digital platforms and paper files. We figured out we are saving at least half a day a week in observations because of TeachBoost. We will never go back to what we were doing before!
Fanning shared, "One of our favorite TeachBoost features is the heatmap. It gives our entire leadership team a broad perspective and allows us to understand if an issue is school-wide, department-wide, or classroom specific."
APRCHS has added tremendous efficiency to the cadence of the yearly observation and evaluation process, and they're able to meet the NYCDOE requirements while staying focused on the professional development needs of their teachers.
We do all of the observation work on TeachBoost and click one button that automatically copies everything over to the Advance Web Application required by NYCDOE.
For 9 years now TeachBoost has enabled for APRCHS: