Tandem will be at the 2026 COSA Summer Institute in Eugene on August 3 and 4. The theme this year is “Teaching. Learning. Leading.” The room is school and district leadership teams spending two days on the year ahead before it starts.
Early August is the right time to have this particular conversation. Priorities get set in the weeks before the first staff meeting, and observation and evaluation usually land somewhere on that list without being the thing anyone wants to spend a summer on. By October, how the cycle runs is already decided.
Oregon administrators are also heading into the fall with SB 141 in effect, which replaced a single summative test score and a stack of compliance checklists with several measures of school health tracked across fall, winter, and spring. Sarah Hayden presented on that at COSA in Seaside in June, alongside Willamina's superintendent and the Danielson Group. The question underneath it was how you meet those requirements without burying the front office in paperwork.
Which comes back to arithmetic. A thorough observation cycle runs two to four hours per teacher once you count the pre-conference, the lesson, the write-up, and the conversation afterward. A building with 50 teachers who each need three to six observations a year cannot absorb that, so something gives, and what gives is almost always the quality of the feedback. None of this is news to the administrators doing the work. The math is just easier to describe than it is to fix.
Elevate, our AI-supported observation platform, is our attempt at fixing it. It transcribes the observation in real time, strips student names for FERPA, and drafts a summary the administrator edits into their own report. It does not hand anyone a finished evaluation to rubber-stamp. The judgment stays with the person who was in the room.
We'll have a booth. Come tell us what your fall actually looks like, especially if it looks worse than last year's. We get more out of those conversations than we do out of demoing.