MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING

ABOUT IMPLEMENTING PACT

2008-09 Academic Year

This MOU outlines the roles and responsibilities of the partner universities in the PACT consortium for the first year of required implementation of the Teaching Performance Assessment. [The program] agrees to fully participate in all activities that support full scale implementation of PACT across all certification areas offered at the institution. PACT has Teaching Events in the following content areas: multiple subjects (literacy or mathematics), agriculture, art, English/language arts, health science, home economics, history/social science, industrial technology education, mathematics, music, physical education, science, world language. Optional versions tailored for bilingual programs are available in elementary literacy, elementary mathematics, English-language arts, history-social science, mathematics, and science. If [the program] offers credentials not covered by this list, the PACT leadership agrees to work with [the program] to develop additional Teaching Events to cover all credentials offered.

The Teaching Event was approved by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing as a Teaching Performance Assessment to be used in recommending prospective teachers for a California Multiple or Single Subject teaching credential, with Embedded Signature Assesments included as optional formative assessments. [The program] may either choose to develop Embedded Signature Assessments to complement the Teaching Event or to use the Teaching Event as a stand-alone assessment.

The PACT consortium and its members will work together on full implementation -- both as an institution and as a consortium – for all candidates for a Multiple or Single Subject Teaching Credential beginning coursework on or after July 1, 2008 (the implementation date established by law).

[The program] shares the PACT consortium’s commitment to working in collaboration to conduct research to further strengthen the reliability and validity of the PACT assessment process, and agrees to devote resources (human and fiscal as well as staff time) to administering and scoring the PACT Teaching Event (TE) and to fully support the prospective teachers that will participate in the implemented teaching performance assessment. PACT has no funding to support implementation, but will provide program services and technical assistance to [the program] as a partner. More specifically,

[The program] AGREES TO:

  1. Administer the Teaching Events (by subject matter) as they are currently designed.

2. Administer the Subject Matter Tasks to Multiple Subject candidates. Specifically, this means one task (Planning, Instruction, or Assessment) of the program’s choice in history-social science and science and one in either literacy or mathematics (the one that is not the area chosen for the Teaching Event). If not using the adapted Elementary Literacy or Elementary Mathematics Teaching Event tasks provided by PACT for Elementary History-Social Science or Elementary Science, [the program] agrees to develop and validate local alternatives that can be scored by the appropriate Teaching Event rubrics according to the guidelines in the document Identifying and/or Developing MS Subject Matter Tasks in Planning, Instruction or Assessment.

3. Ensure that all prospective teachers who will complete a Teaching Event will be supported in its development.

4. Assume responsibility for managing the collection of PACT survey data through Survey Monkey to obtain information needed to evaluate the continued validity and reliability of PACT assessments.

5. Assume responsibility for managing the consent process and collecting consent forms, especially for videotaping in schools.

6. Provide a lead trainer or collaborate with other PACT programs to secure a lead trainer for each credential area in which Teaching Events are being administered, to send local lead trainers to a two-day training, and to fully support faculty or staff’s participation in the PACT training events.

7. Make Teaching Events available for benchmarking and audit purposes, and participate in benchmarking activities.

8. Recruit faculty, staff, supervisors, graduate students (with teaching experience) or practicing teachers to be trained either to score the Teaching Event at the local campus or to participate in a regional training session with other PACT partners. Training and calibration require a two day commitment of scorers to meet the training requirements. Scorer recruitment must be sufficient to cover [the program]’s subject-specific campus scoring needs, including anticipated attrition due to failures or delays in calibration as well as double scoring for reliability checks.

9. Provide feedback to candidates on the Teaching Event and Multiple Subject Subject Matter Tasks, that consists minimally of scores on the applicable rubrics.

10. If participating in a campus-based scoring model, recruit and contribute scorers to a centralized audit/moderation process to assess the consistency of local scoring across institutions. If participating in a regional scoring model, recruit and contribute scorers to a regional training and scoring in sufficient numbers to score all Teaching Events submitted by [the program] and double score those scoring just above, at, or below the passing standard.

11. Participate in a consortiumwide appeals process, whereby if a campus has been found on appeal to not have implemented scorer training or scoring procedures as designed, the Teaching Event will be rescored by a trainer external to [the program].

12. Maintain candidate and scorer databases, including scores and other requested information related to the PACT assessment administration, and provide information from the database to PACT to conduct analyses to examine the reliability and validity of the Teaching Event. Removal of names to afford candidate anonymity and confidentiality, as well as approval or exemption by the local human subject review committee will be the responsibility of the local campus.

13.Collaborate with PACT in conducting research to strengthen the validation of the PACT Teaching Event and to participate in the evaluation of the impact of PACT on faculty and students.

14. Share candidate data with PACT for research and evaluation purposes, subject to the constraints identified by the local Human Subjects review process, and according to the format prescribed by PACT.

15. Systematically collect all documentation to address the Standard 19 requirements.

16. Maintain records to document implementation and quality control procedures for one full accreditation cycle.

17. Provide opportunities for remediation and retaking the assessment in a timely manner for candidates who did not pass either the Teaching Event or a MS Subject Matter Task.

18. Collaborate and share promising practices consortiumwide.

PACT LEADERSHIP WILL:

1.Coordinate any additional development or revision of Teaching Event Handbooks and rubrics, and post current versions on the PACT website.

2.Coordinate the development of a Training of Trainers and training, including benchmarks, in all credential areas in which there are a minimum of 75 candidates consortiumwide.

3.Coordinate the development of annotated Teaching Events to guide scoring in credential areas with less than 75 candidates annually consortiumwide.

4.Provide technical assistance to all IHE’s (including [the program]) in implementing, scoring, and analyzing results from the administration of PACT assessments, including posting materials on the PACT website.

5.Coordinate activities to identify benchmarks for Teaching Events in each subject area.

6.Coordinate training for lead trainers and conduct all training of trainer sessions. Note: training will occur either centrally or regionally.

7.Train selected faculty/supervisors in the audit/moderation processes used to establish the reliability of the Teaching Event(s).

8.Provide data analysis and reporting services to analyze PACT results.

9.Design and implement bias analyses to determine if the design of the assessment discriminates against any subgroup.

10.Develop technical reports to report on the scoring results and disseminate them to each PACT partner.

11.Assist all partners, including [the program], in meeting CTC requirements related to the teaching performance assessment by providing consortium-level documentation or descriptions of PACT assessment policies.

In addition, both the PACT leadership and [the program] agree to collaborate to either strengthen or adapt existing electronic systems that are in place at the campus or to facilitate [the program]’s participation in new technologies that are provided by other vendors.

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Raymond L. Pecheone, Dean

Director, PACTEducation, [the program]

Last updated: August 10, 2008