Educators
Improved Teacher Working Conditions
To assure that Georgia 's educators are working in environments that promote student achievement, extensive research and work will be completed to determine changes needed to ensure Georgia produces the number of SM teachers needed, to identify and support potential SM teachers, to ensure SM teachers continue in their career, and to encourage and support elementary teachers to become SM specialists.
Tactics and Activities
PRISM staff will conduct the following to help ensure P-12 SM teachers have improved working conditions:
- Utilize national and state research to determine existing salary disparities between P-12 SM teachers and other careers with comparable education requirements.
- Identify essential working conditions that allow SM teachers to be most effective in the classroom with students.
- Identify existing barriers that keep SM teachers from being most effective in the classroom.
- Develop promising strategies for teacher incentives in SM.
- Create incentive models to be piloted in school districts.
- Develop policy recommendations for state stakeholders to endorse and support.
Levels of Involvement
- Teacher focus groups will bring together teachers from multiple schools to gather input into the development of promising strategies for teacher incentives in SM.
- A Teacher Incentives Forum will utilize the data gathered from the focus groups and existing national and state research on working conditions to develop incentive models for pilot implementation. Once piloted, the Forum members will work together to develop policy recommendations to be forwarded to the state for consideration.
- PRISM Districts and Schools will be provided an opportunity to pilot the incentive models for further study and refinement.
The goals of the Improving Teacher Working Conditions are:
- To improve the working conditions for SM P-12 teachers.
- To provide a forum for teachers to develop innovative and replicable incentive models.
- To implement various innovative teacher incentive models.