The Final Five Characteristics

 In our full-day meeting on March 27, we made a final decision on the five categories that we felt defined the educator of the future.  Based on the research and input from outside sources, we settled on the following five caetegories:

Academically Prepared Instructor

Highland Park ISD's high academic expectations for its students require educators with

strong content knowledge.

 

Designer of Instruction and Facilitator of Learning

Advancements in brain research and information accessibility have changed the role of

teacher to that of facilitator, one who designs lessons that require active minds to persist in

challenging work.

 

Skilled Assessor

By fully and accurately assessing student learning, educators inform instruction, optimize

learning, and communicate progress. The educator for the future designs and implements

multiple forms of assessment that reflect each student's integrated story of progress and

performance.

Critical and Innovative Thinker

The world is transforming at an exponential rate. In order to meet the needs of learners, the educator for the future is adaptable and exhibits critical and innovative thinking skills.

Role Model

The educator for the future must serve as a positive role model of community and global citizenship and demonstrate effective interpersonal skills.

We made sure that each category had a brief desciption explaining our intention and vision for that characteristic.  Each category was then given a set of 5-8 descriptors to further explain the vision.  We struggled a lot of with wording and organization of the descriptors.  In the end, we sent the document to an editor from the Schlechty center and formed our own small internal editing committee to review the changes from the editor.