Many of this year’s PROSE schools — 62 schools empowered under the new contract to try far-reaching educational changes — have an option to use a modified evaluation system this year after the UFT and the DOE convinced the State Education Department that the system complies with state law.

Teachers in about 26 of the Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (PROSE) will have just two informal observations by supervisors in the course of the year. The rest of the evaluation of their teaching practice will come in the form of a “structured review,” which they will design and implement in collaboration with their principal and colleagues.

Teachers will select their own area of focus, such as refining the way they work with a group of students with a common challenge, or redesigning their approach to teaching biology. They will then spell out their aims for the area and choose activities to help them achieve those objectives. These might include classroom intervisitation, conducting action research or videotaping lessons for self-review, among many options.

The chosen focus must reflect at least three components of the Danielson Framework for Teaching. At the end of the year, teacher and evaluator together review the experience. The review will count for 40 percent of the teacher’s measures of teacher practice (the remainder will be based on the classroom observations).

But what is most interesting about the new evaluation option is that the schools where it is being implemented designed it themselves. “Teachers asked us for this, and we got it for them,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew. “It’s kind of like a performance-based assessment for teachers.”

Participants said they are excited about the option because it gives teachers more control in evaluations and comes closer to capturing real teaching. “We were aiming to develop a really authentic look at teaching,” Mulgrew added.

Alice Cordero, the chapter leader at Beacon HS, which requested the new option on its PROSE proposal last spring, said Beacon used a version of the system last year on top of the standard evaluation system and teachers welcomed it. Some worked on making students more proactive in class; others explored ways to improve a particular content skill. The important part was that teachers selected their own objectives for evaluation.

“It seemed to me and our colleagues that we were being taken seriously in terms of what goes on in our classrooms,” she said. “It helps us want to give more, and my feelings are that the principal and the administration in the school appreciated it.”