001Welcome to this session on getting started with the teacher incentive allotment or TIA. Today our objectives will be to understand the key components of TIA and how to build a local teacher designation system in your district. Second, to become familiar with and begin using a document called the readiness guide. We'll be delving into that shortly. Third, to identify your district's readiness in two specific key success factors that are a part of that readiness guide. And finally, to identify key next steps for your district as you begin to build your local teacher designation system for purposes of the teacher incentive aotment. The vision of the teacher incentive aotment is to support districts in independently building and sustaining strategic compensation systems that differentiate teacher effectiveness. The idea is to help districts build a local teacher designation system
002that can determine who the most effective teachers are in your district so that we can then reward them. If we do that, then we'll be able to incentivize teachers to stay, support more robust teacher recruitment, and make the profession more desirable. In other words, we want to recruit, retain, and reward our most effective teachers. Here is an application timeline for the school year. You'll notice that pre-application could have started as early as last year in the 24-25 school year. Some districts took some time in the last year to think about TIA, maybe watch a webinar to do some basic stakeholder engagement. Um, and so we call that the pre-application year. Not every district does this. So if that is did not happen for you, no worries. Year one will be this year, the 2526 school
003year. The system application posts in December and is due on April 15th. Please note that this is not the kind of application that you just complete. In other words, the district creates their local designation system first and then uses the application to explain what their system is. So that will happen in year one. You will create your system application and then submit it by April 15th. Year two, if your system is accepted, will be what we call your data capture year. That will be the year in which you will collect the teacher observation and student growth data for all the teachers who you who you determined to be eligible teaching assignments on your application. It's also the time at the beginning of that year that TTU, Texas Tech University, sends out a teacher buyin survey
004to get a sense of how what are the teachers in your district thinking about your TIA system? How well informed are they? What do they know about it? How are they feeling about it? A little temperature check on how they're doing. You will get that data and it's great data. Districts have really enjoyed having this data. It helps them to really make sure their system is even more fine-tuned and has more support from their teachers. Year three is when you will submit your data. That's your first data submission year. So all the data you collected during the data capture year will then be submitted in year three. If validated then you will have a full system approval. That means the designations go through, teachers earn designations, teachers get compensated, the aotment dollars start coming in
005and that will be a big celebration for districts who get to designate their first batch of teachers after they have passed data validation. In the meantime, districts also in this year can expand or modify their system. So, it may be that some districts start their system with a few teaching assignments, not all, but want to get eventually to where all of their teaching assignments are eligible. And so, they can expand, add a new teaching assignments each year. They also can modify and maybe that is certain assessment they were using or a certain student growth measure didn't have the results they wanted, they can modify and change things. So, every year a district has the option to expand and or modify their system. And there's two other pieces that happen every year. There's a TIA annual
006evaluation survey. It's kind of similar to the teacher buyin survey except it's much bigger. It's not about the initial impressions of teachers. It's about the health of the system overall. It gets input from teachers, campus leaders, human resources to see how is TIA working in your district. For example, your HR uh department might be at get questions about is TIA actually affecting teacher recruitment and retention, which is one of our goals. So that would be a really great source of data. You will then get a full report back from Texas Tech giving you all that information. And finally, the annual program submission. Every year that your district gets money allotment dollars, you do need to verify how exactly that money was spent and verify that 90% of the money went to teaching roles and up
007to 10% can be held by the district. And finally, post approval, you can always put forth new or higher designations. You can always expand or modify your system every year. Annual program submission. Again, every year that the district has teachers who generate the allotment dollars, the district will need to make sure they have statutory compliance on how those monies were spent. There'll be an annual valuation survey like I mentioned. And the last piece is renewal. So once a system is approved, district local designation systems are valid for five years. So we have a renewal process that will take place in year four so that we can avoid any kind of system expiration for your district. So that is a highlevel view of the full application process. Now we're going to move on to some kind
008of a a more narrow view. Um so we can just talk about this year in particular. So system development, that's where you are right now. How are you going to engage with stakeholders? How are you going to develop your local designation system? What kind of student growth measures do you want to use? which teaching assignments do you feel like you already have valid and reliable student growth measures for things like that? Then you will have your system application, the data capture year and data submission. So those things will be coming. For today's purposes, we're really going to focus just on that first box there, developing the system. And I'm going to walk you through a resource that will really help you to develop your district's system. There are many system components. Three of them have
009statutory ties. I will talk about that. That's the first three. And one is optional. So your system, when you build your system and you tell us how you want to determine who your most effective teachers are, it must have two components that are required by statute. One is a teacher observation component. That could be tests. Does not have to be tests. It could be a district created rubric. It could be the Danielson, the NIAT. There's several rubrics you can use. about 98% of the districts in Texas use tests, but you don't have to use tests. What you do have to do is have a teacher observation component in your system. The second required component is a student growth component. Student growth measures are definitely part of a TIA system. And keep in mind, it's specifically
010a growth measure, not an achievement measure. So we want to make sure that districts are really getting at this idea of have students grown from where they started the year to where they ended the year. Is student growth happening even if it may or may not meet particular achievement goals. So that's the second required component of student growth. The other piece that's statutory is the spending plan. I mentioned before that districts must spend at least 90% of teacher aotment funds on teacher compensation for studentf facing instructional roles. They may reserve if they wish up to 10% for supporting the TIA system at the district level. Maybe that's helping teachers to earn a designation. Maybe it's professional development costs. It could be helping to pay the salary for someone to coordinate TIA in your district. Things
011of that nature. So, you can withhold up to 10% to support TIA and grow even more teachers in your district to become eligible and 90% must go on teacher compensation. And then finally, you can have an optional component to your system. So, like I said, teacher observation is required, student growth is required, optional components obviously are not required. There's something you can consider if you want to. These may be things like uh teacher leadership. Maybe there's a student survey that you use and you feel like we get really great data on teacher effectiveness from our student surveys. You could include that as an optional component if you wish. Those are absolutely optional. That's up to you. That's another reason why this local designation system really is local. You guys get to decide what you want
012to do and how you want to build your system. So, we're going to talk about some best practices for getting started. How exactly do you get started to build a system? Well, good news. We have some best practices for you. Number one is to learn about TIA. And just by listening to this webinar, you're already there. Learn about TIA as much as you can. There's many, many resources out there. I'm going to share some with you. You may know about others already. Also, your education service center, your local regional service center has lots of information, resources for you as well. So, learning about TIA is really, really important. Next is to use a readiness guide. And we're going to go into that readiness guide in just a little bit. It is a document you can
013use that lists out specific success factors and what it looks like to do this well. So that you can use that as a guide to assess your district's readiness at the various components. Next, engage stakeholders, especially teachers. This is very, very important. We don't want this to feel like something that is hidden. It's not hidden. It's a district's decision to build how they want to designate teachers and that should include teacher voices right from the get-go. This may include things like which would be the best student growth measure for any particular teaching assignment. Some teaching assignments the districts and the teachers both feel they already have a really valid growth measure. Great. There may be other teaching assignments where neither the teachers nor the district feel like they have at this moment a really valid
014student growth measure. they may need to plan for that, build for that, pilot something and include those teachers in year two or year three of your system. Things of that nature. Talking to your teachers and making sure that they are well aware of first of all what TIA even is and second of all about how they might participate and what that could look like for them. And finally, another best practice is to attend the technical assistance sessions. The TIA team has regular technical assistance sessions. Some are live webinars, some are recorded webinars, some are resources, some are documents, there's all kinds of technical assistance, there's office hours. Highly encourage you to plan to attend those as soon as you let us know you're interested in building a TIA system. Then we will send you a
015calendar of all the technical assistance sessions for the whole year so you can put them on your calendar and plan to attend them. I highly recommend doing that. I've mentioned resources. So here's just a few. There's these are real links. You'll you have this deck. You can look at these yourself. There's a TIA website has all kinds of information. There's information for the spending staff. There's information for the student growth measures. There's information for teachers. There's information specifically for administrators. There's all kinds of stakeholder engagement resources. Many, many things on there for you to look at. That's a great resource. Secondly, the TIA guide book. It's very, very detailed. this once you get your sense your general sense of TIA and you have more of a kind of in the weeds questions this TIA guide
016book will be your best friend. It has the answers to everything. Highly recommend you look at that when you're ready. And finally, kind of the opposite is the what is TIA. You may be saying, I don't even know what TIA is. I can't read the guide book yet. Not to worry. The TIA video really explains in a nutshell what is TIA and how does it work. It's a very userfriendly introductory video about what TIA is is. Then maybe you look at the website and as you get more into the weeds, you can go into the guidebook to get the absolute um last and final word on how TIA works. We've been talking about stakeholder engagement quite a bit already in this presentation. So I wanted to take a moment to just answer this question. Why
017does stakeholder engagement matter? Well, it turns out with respect to TIA, districts that have strong strategic stakeholder engagement actually develop stronger, more sustainable local designation systems that are more successful. Building teacher volume, which supports retention and recruitment goals happens when you have that strong stakeholder engagement. We really wanted to make sure and we emphasize how important stakeholder engagement is so that you can have the most successful system possible for your district. There are three big critical decisions when you think about building your local teacher designation system. Number one is who can earn a designation. In other words, which teaching assignments will be eligible in your very first year and which campuses will be eligible in your very first year. Some districts include all of their campuses. Some districts include only a few campuses and kind
018of pilot it. That's up to you. Some districts include all of their teaching assignments in year one because they feel like they already have valid and reliable student growth measures for all of their teaching assignments. Some districts include a subset of their teaching assignments in year one, the ones that they know they have valid assignment uh student growth measures for already. and then they have a plan to add in additional teaching assignments in the coming years. Again, those are local decisions. So, that's one of the biggies is who. Second is how how will you designate what is the student growth measure you're going to use? What weight do you want it to be at? What are the student growth measures you will use? What weight will you use those? And will you use any optional
019components or not? You may decide we want our teacher observation component and our student growth to be 50/50 and we don't have any actual components. Or you may want to have your teacher observation be 60%. And your student growth be 40%. Or you might want to have student growth be 30% but then have 10% of additional optional components. All these things are your decisions. And again that's the how. And finally how and when will we compensate? These are discussions you need to have around distribution of the funds, when will the teacher get paid, how will they get paid, those kinds of things. There are many webinars on each of these coming up. This is just a general introductory webinar, but there's many coming along the way that will give you lots of information about teacher
020observation components, a variety of student growth measures you could employ, and lots of information on spending, the details thereof, and how you might work to create your spending plan. We will not be covering those details in this presentation, but there are resources on the TI website and in your ESC's on each of these specific three critical decisions. Now, we're going to go into the resource we have for you for today, which is the readiness guide. It's a readiness guide for how you can build your local teacher designation system. What it is is it's a resource and it just breaks down the success factors that are needed to build a successful local designation system. So there are seven su success factors and this is a way to ensure that that critical pre-planning happens before you start
021creating specific system details. It will give you a guide to key milestones and best practices at each of the various stages in all of the seven success factors. And it's also a way that districts can assess your current level of readiness for each of the milestones in there. Today, we're really going to focus on only two of the seven success factors. I highly recommend you use this video and come back and g gauge your your district's readiness at all seven at a later time. So, this is what it looks like. It's called the readiness guide. It has an introductory page. You'll see it here. The link is off there to the right. it. It will go through and list all of the success factors and will include key milestones for each one with a space
022for you to determine your readiness. Before we go into what it looks like, I want to just make sure we're clear. Are districts required to use the TIA readiness guide? No, you are not required to use it. No one's going to ask you. It's just a resource that helps districts build a viable and successful designation system that'll be represented in your application. So, you can also customize it. There may be pieces of it that don't apply to you. For example, there's information in there about how to do crosscampus calibration walkthroughs for teacher observation. There are some districts out there that only have one campus. That part would not be relevant to them. Feel free to customize it and adapt it as will work for you. It is a tool, a resource for you to help
023you. It is not required. It's just um something that we think will really help you do it. So, we encourage you to use it, but you don't have to use it. So, basically, there's three phases of the readiness guide. One is pre-work. The next one is district assessing the district readiness to apply. And then the last one is building the actual system itself and submitting the application. So, we're going to just talk a little bit about pre-work. Some of you already have done the pre-work. Some of you may not, and that's fine. You can do that in in the next month or so. We're really going to focus in on that second one, which is assessing your district's readiness. We'll talk about that quite a bit. And then when you finish that, that's when you'll
024build your actual system and submit your application. So phase one, like I mentioned, is learning about TIA. These are the key phases of phase one. Determine a district TIA lead. Who will be leading this work in your district? form a TIA planning committee. The committee should include all kinds of people. It should have teachers. It should have campus leaders. It should have district leaders. We'll talk about that in a second. And then attend TIA training. So, those are all of the pieces of a um phase one to make sure you're ready to really do your pre-work. You can jump in and build your system. And again, I put the resources there. The website, the guide book, and the what is TI video all can help in that phase one. Phase two is assessing your district's
025readiness. And there's milestones for phase two, which is determining your rationale and your goals. Why do you want to build a local teacher designation system? Why do you want to participate in TIA? And it also lists the key practices for each success factor. What is your readiness? And what are your next steps? So, we're going to look at success factor 2 specifically. That one is around stakeholder engagement. And you can see on the left here there's two pieces. There's a TAA planning committee and then there's stakeholder engagement activities. On the TIA planning committee, one of the success factors is that you have a TIA planning committee. There is a well publicized application process to determine who would be on this committee. There's also note for smaller districts an application process may not be necessary. There
026are districts that have 20 teachers, 10 teachers, 15 teachers. You may not need a formal process. larger districts, it's helpful to have a process so that you know who wants to be part of building your local teacher designation system. And then the planning committee should include multiple teachers, campus leaders, district leaders, and be representative of uh the grades and the contents taught in your district. So that's piece one is to build that TIA planning committee. The second piece is conducting stakeholder engagement. How has that TIA planning committee gone out and taught to stakeholder groups including teachers? Explained what TIA is, talked about the what what possible components for the system? What is the clear plan that you plan to use to implement feedback that you get from stakeholders? How will you review it? How will
027you implement it where feasible? Those kind of pieces. So those are the two success factors we're going to be looking at today. And I have a sample from a district who did this. Daisy ISD, they took this exact success factor 2 from the readiness guide and they determined their readiness. So for the TIA planning committee, this district is ready. They already formed their TIA committee. It's representative of all the grade levels that the district teaches. It has various content areas of the teachers. It has campus leaders and it has district leaders. And actually in this example, Day included their superintendent on the TI planning committee as well. So they're ready. Their next step, however, is to formalize their meeting calendar. They have not yet set their meeting calendar, and they know that what gets scheduled
028gets done. So, they really want to make sure their next step is to formalize their meeting calendar. We'll be meeting every week, every other week. They might want to meet more often early in the year, maybe not quite as often later in the year, those kinds of things. So, that's their next step. They're ready, but they have a next step for part B. They are not ready yet. They have not yet done any of the stakeholder engagement sessions. They haven't conducted meetings. They haven't shared information. They just now got done forming their committee. So the next step there would be to go ahead and conduct informational meetings with campus leaders and teachers so they know what TI is and how Daisy plans to pursue it. So that's their readiness for success factor 2. highly encourage
029you to use this exercise with your district and take the time to determine both your readiness and your next step for success factor 2. Success factor 3 is the second one we'll highlight today just to give you a taste of what this could look like. We're not going to go through all seven. You should uh eventually, but right now we're just focus on the second one which is success factor three. And this is the one around eligible teachers. How will you determine which teachers will you will include in year one? Which teaching assignments do you want to include? And keep in mind, this is teaching assignments, not teachers. It's not like Miss Smith can participate, Miss Jones cannot. No, it's teaching assignments. Algebra one. All algebra 1 teachers are eligible or all algebra 1 teachers
030are not eligible. All kindergarten teachers are eligible or all kindergarten teachers are not eligible in year one. You get to decide which eligible teaching assignments you want to include. Once you've decided which ones you want to include, part B then is how do you combine them into teaching categories? You can combine into the same teaching category all the teaching assignments that use the same growth measure with the same method for setting expected growth. For example, if you want to a district wants to include all of their fourth through 8th reading and math teachers and they want to use star and the growth measure is star transition tables, then all fourth through eighth grade reading and math are all in one category. They could not include third grade reading and math in that particular category because
031while third grade has a star test, they do not have transition tables. That would need to be a separate category for third grade reading and math perhaps using STAR but then there would be a district created growth target or they could use a different test. They don't have to use STAR or they can use a different growth measure entirely like student learning objectives. But what you can't condun is do is combine into the same category teaching assignments that use different methods for setting expected growth. So once you decide who's eligible then you decide how do you group them into categories using that definition. And then finally, your teacher observation component, how you determined what it's going to be and what weight you want it to have. So that's success factor 3 in a nutshell. And
032we're going to go back to our friends at Daisy ISD and see what they did. So for them on the eligible teaching assignments, they are not ready yet. They need to discuss teaching assignments with the district and really decide which ones they're ready to include in year one. They haven't gotten there yet. They wanted to include everybody initially, but they're realizing as they meet that some teaching assignments may not really have valid and reliable growth measures that they can that they know yet they're familiar using. So they are going to go back and talk to the teachers and figure out what they can do to include some of those teachers maybe in year two and year three and include only a smaller subset in year one. So that is something that they need to do.
033They're not ready yet. they have their next step is to make make those decisions, but they're not ready yet in terms of how to categorize them. They're not ready for that yet because they haven't determined which ones they want to include yet. So, their next step there is once they've decided the eligible teaching assignments they want to use, they will combine them in categories based on the definition that's right there in this readiness guide for you. And then in terms of teacher observation component, they are ready. They've already decided they're using tests. Daisy IC happens to be a test district. um and they're going to share that with their teachers. They've already determined that that's what they want to do and they've determined they want to be worth 50%. So, they're ready on teacher observation
034component. They're not ready on the other two yet. So, they have next steps. So, this is just an example using Daisy ISD of how your district can use this readiness guide to determine your readiness in each of the success factors as well as your next step to get there. So keep in mind and want to just take a step back. This is going to be a building a plan one piece at a time kind of thing. There are a lot of success factors. There's a lot of pieces within each success factor and that's okay. Just take it one piece at a time and make sure you have clear next steps as well as a plan for who and when those next steps will will happen. So here's Daisy ISD exam again their example. Finalize all
035TIA information resources. That's going to be the superintendent is responsible for that by September 22nd. And then conducting the actual state cover engagement meetings. That's the TIA planning committee's responsibility and they want to conduct two by October 10th. So they have a plan to do that. They know those are their next steps and now they want to know who is going to be doing the next step and by when. Success Factory 3. They had their next steps are to make sure they determine the proposed eligible teaching assignments. The TIA planning committee will have that done by October 27th, which includes lots of stakeholder engagement with teachers. They want to make sure they finalize that this the decision of the teacher observation rubric to be used and the weight, which the planning committee has already done.
036They want to make sure they get it past the human resources director and have it formally confirmed by September 15th. And finally, they want to determine which student growth measures will be used for each of the eligible teaching assignments they decide to include by November 21st. And that will be a combination of the direct director of curriculum assessment and the TIA planning committee. This is just an example. You don't have to do this this way. This this may be the titles you use in your district for these kinds of people who do these roles. This is just a sample of how you can use that readiness guide to really hone in on the next step, who's responsible, and by when, so that you can have your system built on time, a robust, successful system with
037buyin from your stakeholders and ready to go and be submitted by April 15th of 2026. So, some key points to summarize. One, learn about TIA. Two, use the readiness guide that we just went through in our Daisy ISD example to determine your district's readiness at each of the key success factors. Identify next steps for each success success factor. And finally, assign roles and dates. Once you know what your next steps are, make sure you assign roles and dates to get those done so they can be completed on time and your application will be ready to go. In terms of your next steps, number one, email the TIA team. That's TIA tea.ex.gov to request a letter of intent. Your letter of intent is not binding. It's just you letting us know you're considering applying for the
038teacher incentive aotment and submitting an application in April of 2026. Once you do that, you will then get all kinds of resources. You'll get a calendar with all of the technical assistance sessions we offer. You'll get information that you need. You'll get regular emails. You'll get a monthly newsletter. It'll just make sure we keep you as informed as possible about TIA and what's going on as well as any updates that happen along the way. So once you let us know you're interested, then you'll get a lot of information that'll keep you in the loop. Highly recommend if you are interested that you go ahead and submit your letter of intent. Then once you do that, plan to attend the actual sessions. I mentioned you have a calendar. Go ahead and plan to attend. They've been
039very very helpful based on many districts that have come before you who said they really got a lot out of them. So I highly encourage you to attend those sessions. Also reach out to your local education service center. They have a lot of information and staff ready and willing to help specifically with TIA. And there's a list there. That link is the list of who the people are in your region who specifically work with TIA who can help your district with your application. And finally, if you haven't already, start forming your TIA planning committee and reaching out to stakeholders so that you can get your system built as cohesively as possible. That is all we have for you today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Please be sure to submit your letter
040of intent if you are interested in applying for TIA as well as any other questions that you might have to the TIA inbox. And again, that's TIA tea.ex.com. texas.gov. Thank you.