On Wednesday, June 17, Tandem Education co-founder Sarah Hayden takes the stage at the COSA Conference in Seaside, Oregon, for a session built around a question every Oregon administrator is now wrestling with: how do you meet the demands of SB 141 without burying your front office in compliance paperwork?
The session, “The Willamina Journey: Navigating SB 141 through Teacher Excellence,” lands in a good spot: the first breakout of Wednesday morning at 9:55, in the Seaside Convention Center right next to the keynote room. Sarah presents with Mike Gass, superintendent of Willamina School District, and Lindsay Prendergast of the Danielson Group. Between the three of them you get a district living the new accountability rules, the framework that defines strong instruction, and the technology that makes the whole thing workable in the field.
Why Willamina
SB 141 rewrote how Oregon measures school success. The old model leaned on a single summative test score and a stack of compliance checklists. The new one asks districts to track several measures of school health across the year, with fall, winter, and spring checkpoints meant to catch gaps before they harden into outcomes. It moves the state from refereeing to coaching, and it puts real weight on what happens inside classrooms.
Willamina School District 30J is a useful case study precisely because it can't pretend the work is easy. With 791 students, a 44 percent poverty rate, and 42 percent of students from historically underserved groups, the district is measured against peers facing the same realities. The session walks through how Willamina reads its own data, figures out where it sits among comparable districts, and uses that picture to drive decisions instead of just satisfying a reporting requirement.
A shared language for what good teaching looks like
The middle of the session belongs to the Danielson Group's Framework for Teaching. Lindsay Prendergast's argument is simple: a district can't coach toward excellence without a shared definition of what excellence is. The 2022 Framework gives administrators and teachers the same vocabulary for what strong instruction involves, from how a teacher frames the purpose of a lesson to how they question students and adjust when a lesson goes sideways.
The research behind this is hard to argue with. Of all the factors that move student achievement, feedback and collective teacher efficacy sit near the top. Students who get highly effective teachers three years running can finish more than 30 percentile points ahead of classmates who started in the same place. The teacher at the front of the room is the variable that moves everything else, which is why getting evaluation right matters so much.
Where Elevate comes in
The third part of the session is the part Tandem cares about most. The math of the current system doesn't work. One observation cycle can run two to four hours from notes to finished report, and a building with 50 teachers who each need three to six observations a year turns that into an impossible season. So evaluations collapse into checkbox exercises, and nearly every teacher gets rated proficient even when student outcomes say otherwise.
Elevate, Tandem's AI-supported observation platform, gives that time back. During an observation it transcribes the classroom in real time and strips out student names for FERPA compliance, so the evaluator can put the laptop down and actually watch the lesson. Afterward it suggests how the evidence lines up with the Danielson framework and drafts a summary the administrator uses to build their own report. It doesn't hand a principal a finished evaluation to rubber-stamp. The administrator owns the judgment; Elevate just takes care of the capture and the busywork so that judgment has room to happen.
Sarah will show what that looks like in practice: a piece of evidence from the room, a suggested link to the relevant framework component, and a reflective question written in the kind of invitational language that turns an evaluation into a coaching conversation. Instead of “you should restructure this group work,” it might offer “how might you restructure the group work so each student has an accountable role?” Teachers don't just tolerate feedback like that. They ask for it.
Come find us
Tandem will be exhibiting Elevate at the conference, and Sarah, along with co-founders Rolland Hayden and Julian Pscheid, will be around throughout. If you're an Oregon administrator trying to work out what SB 141 means for your buildings this fall, or you've watched your principals quietly start using consumer AI tools to keep up with the evaluation load, the session is worth your Wednesday morning.
Stop by the booth, catch the 9:55 breakout, or just come say hello. With more than 500 educators on site, COSA is where the conversation about Oregon's new accountability era is happening, and we want to be in it.
Sarah Hayden can be reached at sarah@tandem-education.com.