St. Cecilia in Dallas: Launching New Data-Informed PD With EANS + ClassWallet
Dallas private school partnering with TeachFX to support their mission of stimulating critical thinking and nurturing the whole student
St. Cecilia Catholic School is a private Catholic school in Dallas, Texas, serving close to 150 students from pre-K through 8th grade.
Their nearly 20 teachers include 10 classroom teachers as well as enrichment teachers for music, art, Spanish, PE, tech, and library.
Dra. Diana Torres Rivera, instructional coach at St. Cecilia Catholic School and 2020 Halo Educator of the Year, is focused on empowering teachers to achieve their full potential inside and outside of the classroom, as well as implementing language acquisition and teaching strategies in Spanish for K-12 education.
Having used TeachFX at her previous school, Diana knew that TeachFX would be the right tool to both guide her coaching and empower her teachers in the way she envisioned.
Dr. Torres Rivera started by using TeachFX herself
In addition to serving as the instructional coach for 16 teachers at St. Cecilia’s, Diana teaches Spanish twice a week and has also stepped in to teach English on occasion.
Diana first used TeachFX in her own classroom at St. Cecilia’s. Over the course of a semester, she recorded a number of her own lessons, in both her English and Spanish classes. She began sharing her TeachFX Class Reports with other teachers. Along with the Class Reports, she included her own self-reflection and the goals she’d noted for herself in the app.
By incorporating TeachFX’s feedback into her one-on-one conversations with teachers, and modeling that vulnerability of self-reflection herself, Diana helped her teachers see the power of using TeachFX on their own.
Having piloted TeachFX for herself, with a few of her teachers, Diana helped launch St. Cecilia’s partnership with TeachFX. Utilizing Emergency Assistance for Non-Public Schools (EANS) funding, Diana structured a multi-year partnership with TeachFX that aligned with her instructional priorities and locked in pricing for St. Cecilia for multiple years.
Dr. Torres Rivera is integrating TeachFX into her instructional coaching sessions and classroom observations.
When observing her teachers in the classroom, Diana lets them know that she’s going to record the class and that they’ll talk about the report afterwards. That proactive communication, alongside the knowledge that she’s used TeachFX in her own classroom, has really helped teachers feel comfortable with this approach.
Integrating TeachFX into teaching and learning is helping create a culture of reflection at St. Cecilia’s.
One of the school’s priorities this year is for teachers to feel proficient at creating SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals – and how they’ll achieve them. Diana is finding TeachFX is a great way to support this focus.
One of Diana’s biggest takeaways from TeachFX’s reflectivity is that questions built in to the Class Reports guide teachers, especially those newer to the profession, to reflect on their own:
Are these the words that I wanted to be using in this class?
What about think time?
What about the longest stretches of student or teacher talk time, what do you see there?
St. Cecilia’s main focus for this school year is implementing more data-informed professional development - TeachFX is helping there, too.
Another key priority for the school this year is to use more data-informed PD. St. Cecilia currently implements data-informed curricula, including IStation and HMH Into Reading, to help teachers gather objective data on students’ learning outcomes.
TeachFX provides teachers with objective data for their instructional practice.
As Diana says, “TeachFX provides actual data - because teaching is a science!” It’s a way to fully round out the school’s approach to data-informed teaching and learning.
Pairing use of the TeachFX app with personalized Professional Learning Sessions facilitated by TeachFX helps teachers learn new practices and see their results in real time.
As the instructional coach for the school, Diana handles the PL program and is partnering with our educators to design PL workshops that align with her vision, her teachers’ needs, and her school’s priorities.
Interested in utilizing EANS funds and ClassWallet to support professional development?
💡St. Cecilia utilized funds through the (EANS) to launch the partnership.
✅ And now that TeachFX is an approved vendor on ClassWallet, your private school might be able to do the same!
