Our Commitment to Teacher Growth:
A Look Behind the Scenes

How do you measure confidence? Or track the moment a good teacher becomes a great mentor for their peers? At TeachUNITED, supporting teachers on their professional journey is the heart of what we do. To do it well, we need to understand their growth in a meaningful way. For years, like many organizations, we’ve used surveys to gather feedback. But what’s the difference? While valuable, we knew that to truly support our teachers, we needed to go deeper than satisfaction scores.

Assessments are designed to evaluate a learner’s mastery of specific skills, knowledge, and competencies. Surveys, while valuable for gathering feedback, often lack the depth and specificity to measure growth. Good assessments allow us to pinpoint areas of strength and weakness, identify knowledge gaps, and tailor interventions to address specific learning needs. Survey data, while helpful, often lacks the granularity to inform such targeted improvement strategies. And, in today’s data-driven world, demonstrating the ROI of a learning program is crucial. Assessments can provide the evidence needed to showcase the tangible impact of training initiatives on participants’ growth and development, which in turn allows us to make a stronger case to both internal and external stakeholders.

TeachUNITED is proud to launch a new approach: teacher self-assessments based on defined growth progressions — clear roadmaps for improvement — to track participant progress and understand the effectiveness of our learning initiatives.

These assessments are a collaborative tool, not a test, encouraging our teachers and participants to examine their knowledge, skills, and efficacy. When participants actively engage in a self-assessment that provides transparent results, they take ownership of their growth journey. They can see and chart progress along the key competencies of the defined growth progression, making their learning visible. They become invested in their development through insights into areas of strength and growth opportunities.

This new tool helps us answer a critical question for our partners and funders: How do we know our training is creating lasting change? Here’s a look at how we built it.

How We Built It – and How You Can Too

Step 1: Focusing on What Matters Most for Teachers

We started by asking: What are the skills that, when strengthened, make the biggest difference for ensuring school improvement? For us, two areas stood out: Instructional Leadership and Mentorship.

• Instructional Leadership is defined as the ability of educators to effectively adopt, adapt, and implement instructional strategies that drive student learning. This includes the ability to reflect on practice, use data to inform teaching, and foster continuous professional growth.
• For Mentorship (or Teacher-as-Coach), we are looking at the ability of educators to guide less experienced (or less trained) teachers to share effective teaching strategies with peers, foster a climate of continuous improvement in their school, and build professional learning communities. This focus ensures our work creates sustainable, school-wide improvement that lasts long after our direct involvement ends. 

Step 2: Create a Growth Progression Framework

Next, we mapped out what growth looks like in each of these skill areas. To create a clear and encouraging path for development, we opted for 5 levels.

For each skill, or competency domain, we briefly described what it looks like to be at each stage of the journey, defining the characteristics of a participant at each level.

• Level 1 reflects the characteristics of an educator as they first begin the program.
• Level 3 reflects the desired characteristics of educators who are proficient in core skills upon completion of the program, where we expect most participants to finish.
• Level 5 reflects the characteristics of educators who exceed expectations after the program, becoming true leaders and mentors in their schools.
• Levels 2 and 4 fill in the steps along the way.

From there, we identified specific and observable indicators for each level. Referencing our level descriptions, our goal was to create a list of concrete behaviors and observable indicators that could be directly measured, making the path to growth as clear as possible for participating educators.

We then analyzed the level descriptions and indicators for emerging themes. Three themes emerged for the Instructional Leadership domain (instructional strategies, professional development, and use of data) and two for the Mentorship domain (modeling/coaching and mentoring).

Step 3: Building the Assessment

With a clear roadmap in place, we designed the self-assessment. Our goal was to create something empowering, not intimidating. We chose to use a 1-5 rating scale ranging from “Not me at all” to “Totally me.” This format encourages honest self-reflection and helps teachers pinpoint exactly where they are on their growth journey.

Because we are using assessments across different geographical, cultural, and linguistic regions, we are careful to test how the questions and rating scales work with our participants. Agreement/disagreement terms are often highly localized, and we work closely with our local teams to get them right.

This assessment will be piloted in Africa, Latin America, and the United States within our data collection platform. Items are randomly presented to participants across all themes and levels and scored by theme and competency domain. To generate theme and domain scores by participant, item scores are weighted according to level, with the highest levels across the growth progression receiving the highest weighting. Theme and domain scores are also scaled to range from one to five for a more direct mapping to the level descriptors of the growth progressions within each key competency domain.

From Data to Deepened Impact

This tool does more than just provide data; it deepens our partnership with the educators we serve. With individual participant scores and group scores by theme and domain aligned with the defined competency levels, participants and TeachUNITED can easily garner insights into the competency gained between assessments. The results give both teachers and our coaches a shared understanding of strengths and opportunities for growth.

This allows TeachUNITED to see where participants are growing the most, where we may need to spend additional time, and highlights opportunities for deeper learning. It helps to make coaching as impactful as possible.

Our Commitment to Learning and Improvement

As we pilot this new tool, we’re committed to transparency and continuous improvement. We will be field-testing the growth progression framework itself and seeing how it is received by participants. We will regularly review and update the framework and the self-assessment to ensure they remain relevant, effective, and useful as we continue the work.