San Francisco Sun

The current teacher evaluation model may not be as motivational as it is intended to be, and Dr. Roger Billings is a proponent of a new way to monitor and evaluate teachers and the motivation levels of their students. 

In 2016, he wrote about The Success Zone, a model that focuses on getting students into the courses they are prepared for.

In a 2016 paper at the iNACOL Blended Learning Symposium, Billings and co-author Dr. Kevin Baker presented “Success Zone: Empowering Teachers to Transform ‘Stuck Students’ into Successful Learners.”

“The Student Success Zone is an education strategy that helps students succeed by getting into the right courses and at the right levels to consistently progress. It is targeted to help students who are 'stuck' in their learning progress break free. When deployed on a learning platform such as the Acellus Learning System, the Student Success Zone becomes a model capable of helping every student excel,” Billings and Baker wrote. 

“The Success Zone empowers teachers with real-time data to inform their instructional approach in the classroom," they wrote. "As students move forward in their learning journey, not all find themselves on a pathway to success. Teachers are able to catch the students on the brink of failure, break down the barriers of being stuck on a skill, and turn each student into a learner who now is motivated to reach and exceed expectations.“

The model allows schools to identify barriers before the failure happens, and allows them to remediate the barriers, to improve attendance, course completion, diploma readiness and college preparedness, the said in the paper.

Removing the barriers can help to motivate students to learn. Motivating students to learn can be a tricky thing, but it starts with ensuring that students are ready for the content they are learning, they argue.

“In circumstances where students are taking a course they are not prepared for, it doesn’t matter how many times they hear the lesson or attempt the problems, they simply will not reach mastery of the skills and concepts. Content mastery is based upon a foundation of previous learning. The fact remains that if they are not ready for the new content, then the teaching is probably not relevant to the learner. The result is that the student does not succeed in learning the new skills and concepts. Students that are not succeeding are outside of their Success Zone,” they write. 

For students, the Success Zone is defined as an overall grade that exceeds a defined learning rubric, and within Accellus, that bar is 75%.

And, in order to motivate teachers, to go beyond the traditional model of evaluation, Success Zones does not tie teacher evaluations to student aptitudes, the report shows.  

Billings is the creator of the Accellus Education System, a self-paced online learning program.