AI-powered teacher evaluations
for California educators.
Cut evaluation documentation from hours to minutes. EvalScribe is built around the 2024 California Standards for the Teaching Profession natively — all six standards, all twenty-eight elements, and the five-level Developmental Continuum, in the standards' own language.
Saved per evaluation
All 6 CSTP standards, built in
To capture notes
Evaluator-controlled ratings
Three evaluations free — no credit card · Individual plans from $100/year · School & district licensing available
Endorsed by educational leaders
Game changer. Absolute game changer for school admin.
Tobin Davidson · Assistant Superintendent · 40+ years in education
This is amazing. I would pay lots of money for this. I’m serious — it’s crazy good.
Kittie Brown · Assistant Principal
Also endorsed by Dr. Robert Stinson · Glenn Brown · Angie Brandt — read full quotes ↓
Built by a classroom teacher
Founded by a practicing K–12 educator with nearly 20 years in the field.
California-specific
All 6 CSTP standards and 28 elements, built in natively.
Privacy-first
Transient processing on Microsoft Azure. Never used for AI training.
Built for workflow
Designed around the realities of being a California evaluator.
California teaches on the CSTP. EvalScribe is built around all six standards.
The California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTP) — adopted by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing in April 2024, the first major revision since 2009 — describe the knowledge, skills, and practices of effective California teachers across six standards. EvalScribe is built around the CSTP's own structure: six standards, twenty-eight elements, and the five-level Developmental Continuum, in the standards' own language.
California Standards for the Teaching Profession (2024)
Six standards span engaging students, the learning environment, subject-matter knowledge, instructional planning, assessment, and professional growth. Beneath them sit twenty-eight elements, each described across five levels. The CSTP frames this as a Developmental Continuum, not a scoreboard — Applying is the expected professional standard, with Integrating and Innovating describing more fluid, responsive, and leadership-level practice above it, and Emerging and Exploring describing growth toward it.
Six standards. Twenty-eight elements.
Engaging & Supporting All Students in Learning
4 elements- 1A Focus on Students · 1B Knowledge of Students
- 1C Student Backgrounds & Family Engagement
- 1D Diversity and Equity
Creating & Maintaining Effective Environments
4 elements- 2A Learning Environment · 2B Student Behavior
- 2C Organizational & Resource Management
- 2D Inclusive Environment
Understanding & Organizing Subject Matter
5 elements- 3A Knowledge of Subject Matter & Pedagogy
- 3B Connecting Subject Matter to Real-World Contexts
- 3C Curriculum & Resources for Specific Students & Groups
- 3D Content & Skills across Subjects
- 3E Curriculum Materials and Resources
Planning Instruction & Designing Learning
4 elements- 4A Planning Instruction for Student Learning
- 4B Designing & Developing Instruction
- 4C Facilitating Instruction
- 4D Adapting Instruction
Assessing Students for Learning
4 elements- 5A Understanding & Using Assessments
- 5B Interpreting & Using Assessment Data
- 5C Communication of Assessment & Data
- 5D Assessment for Continuous Improvement
Developing as a Professional Educator
7 elements- 6A Reflection on Practice
- 6B Focused Professional Learning
- 6C Collaboration with Colleagues
- 6D Collaboration with Families, Guardians & Community
- 6E Ethical Conduct & Professional Responsibilities
- 6F Activating Access and Equity
- 6G Personal Growth and Well-Being
The five-level Developmental Continuum.
Emerging
Exploring
Applying
Professional standardIntegrating
Fluid & responsiveInnovating
Leadership-levelHow EvalScribe handles the CSTP
All six standards and all twenty-eight elements are built into the tool, each with the CSTP's own language across the five levels, the look-fors, and the distinctions that separate adjacent levels on the continuum. EvalScribe maps your evidence to the relevant elements and drafts best-fit ratings and feedback in the standards' voice — treating Applying as the professional standard it's designed to be, not a middling score, and reserving Integrating and Innovating for practice that is genuinely more fluid, responsive, and leadership-level.
Honest scope on California's local control: the CSTP is the state's professional standards continuum, developed by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and CDE — it is the universal reference for California's mandatory two-year induction program, where beginning teachers self-assess against the CSTP with a mentor to build an Individual Learning Plan. Formal annual and biennial evaluations, however, are governed by the Stull Act (Cal. Ed. Code §44660–44665), which requires each district to have an evaluation program but leaves the specific rubric to local bargaining. Many districts adopt the CSTP continuum directly; others use a locally negotiated rubric that draws on CSTP and Danielson with its own scale and structure. EvalScribe is built around the state's own CSTP continuum; if your district uses a different locally bargained instrument, let us know at [email protected].
How EvalScribe works with the CSTP.
A five-step path from the back of the classroom to a finished, standards-aligned evaluation.
Observe the classroom
Formal observation or walkthrough — capture what you see the way you always have.
Enter notes your way
Type, dictate, or snap a photo of your handwritten notes. Smart Scan converts handwriting to text.
Map evidence to elements
EvalScribe identifies which of the 28 CSTP elements each note supports, across all six standards.
Suggested ratings & comments
Get draft ratings and feedback language in the CSTP's own voice, across the five-level continuum.
Review & finalize
Edit anything you want, finalize the evaluation, and export a clean PDF for your records.
EvalScribe runs natively on iPhone, iPad, and Mac — work where you are.
Capture notes the way you already work.
No retraining required. Whatever your walkthrough style, EvalScribe accepts it.
Snap a photo
Photograph your handwritten notes mid-walkthrough. Smart Scan OCR converts handwriting to text — even messy handwriting, even pedagogical terms.
Dictate as you go
Speak observations directly into the app. Voice dictation captures what you saw without breaking your eye contact with the classroom.
Type directly
Prefer to type? Enter notes straight into the app — they flow into the same CSTP-aware drafting pipeline as scans and dictation.
Why generic AI falls short for the CSTP.
Pasting your walkthrough notes into a general-purpose chatbot might produce a paragraph that sounds polished — but for CSTP documentation, "sounds polished" isn't the bar. Defensible, standards-aligned evaluations are.
| Capability | Generic AI (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) | EvalScribe |
|---|---|---|
| Framework awareness | ✕No concept of the CSTP, its 28 elements, or its five-level Developmental Continuum. Treats every prompt the same. | ✓Built around the CSTP's actual structure, element language, and five-level continuum. |
| Element mapping | ✕Hallucinates standard and element labels and invents rubric language that doesn't exist in the CSTP. | ✓Maps evidence to the real 28 CSTP elements using the actual standards loaded into the app. |
| The developmental continuum | ✕Treats the scale as generic good-to-bad, missing that Applying — not Innovating — is the professional standard. | ✓Suggests best-fit ratings across the five-level continuum based on the preponderance of captured evidence. |
| The Innovating bar | ✕Conflates strong classroom teaching with Innovating and hands out the top level freely. | ✓Drafts to the real CSTP bar — Innovating turns on leadership-level, agency-building practice, not solid Applying-level teaching. |
| Local rubric variation | ✕No idea that California districts negotiate their own Stull Act evaluation instruments. | ✓Built around the state's own CSTP continuum, with the local-bargaining reality named up front. |
| Note input | ✕Requires you to retype everything before the AI can do anything with it. | ✓Accepts typed notes, dictation, or photos of handwritten notes via Smart Scan OCR. |
| Feedback language | ✕Vague, generic comments that could describe any teacher. | ✓Professional, evidence-anchored feedback written in the language of the CSTP. |
| Data privacy | ✕Free tiers may use your inputs to train public models. | ✓Enterprise-grade Microsoft Azure. Transient processing. Zero retention. Never used for training. |
| Defensibility | ✕Output you can't trace back to evidence or standards language. | ✓Every comment is tied to evidence pulled from your notes and the element it supports. |
How much California evaluation time could you reclaim?
Tune the inputs to your reality. The numbers update as you go.
You could reclaim approximately
hours per year
Workdays reclaimed
Total evaluations
Based on early EvalScribe users saving an average of 35 minutes per evaluation. Individual results may vary based on your current workflow.
The best way to see it
is to watch it.
Reading about how EvalScribe drafts a CSTP evaluation isn't the same as watching it happen. The demo walks through a real observation — capture, mapping, scoring, and final export — start to finish.
The draft review screen — every comment, rating, and piece of mapped evidence is fully editable before export.
See an example EvalScribe report.
A real EvalScribe-generated evaluation, formatted exactly as it exports from the app. The workflow is the same across frameworks — useful to share with district stakeholders.
Download sample PDFWhat educational leaders are saying.
Real feedback from administrators across roles — from academic coaches to assistant superintendents.
EvalScribe is a tool that every public school principal should use. This resource literally makes multiple people out of administrators, allowing them to focus their energies on precise observation analysis and quality feedback while leaving EvalScribe to handle the mechanics. This tool will remove virtually all of the drudgery from the classroom evaluation process and would represent an excellent use of school funds.
Dr. Robert Stinson
Principal
After seeing a detailed demonstration of EvalScribe, I came away very impressed with both the concept and the execution. The platform provides administrators with a practical way to quickly capture classroom observations and generate high-quality, customized feedback that remains aligned to their evaluation framework and local expectations. What stood out most was the balance between efficiency and quality. EvalScribe has the potential to reduce administrative workload while helping school leaders provide more timely and meaningful feedback to teachers — a tool with considerable promise for schools and districts.
Glenn Brown
Director of Student Services
Game changer. Absolute game changer for school admin.
Tobin Davidson
Assistant Superintendent · 40+ years in education
This is amazing. I would pay lots of money for this. I’m serious — it’s crazy good. I look forward to using it on a regular basis next year.
Kittie Brown
Assistant Principal
Evaluators spend an inordinate amount of time recording and documenting evaluations. This app is easy to use, affordable, and incredibly efficient. It cuts the time spent recording and documenting evaluations down significantly and frees us up to handle other aspects of the job. Plus, the conference suggestions save on prep time when a conference is warranted.
Angie Brandt
Academic Coach
Built by educators, for educators.
EvalScribe was co-founded by a practicing classroom teacher and his wife — a husband-and-wife team with thirty years of combined classroom and business experience.
Anthony Neely, Ph.D.
Co-founder · Product
A tenured K–12 classroom teacher and Professional Learning Lead. District Teacher of the Year, with nearly 20 years in education and three published books.
Andrea Neely, Ph.D.
Co-founder · Business
Associate Professor of Management. Research and teaching in organizational management.
Your evaluation data stays yours.
Observation notes are processed transiently on Microsoft Azure and are not retained on our servers. Your evaluation records live locally on your device. Notes and evaluations are never used to train public AI models. For districts needing a Data Processing Agreement or FERPA attestation, those are available on request.
Simple, transparent pricing.
Try EvalScribe with three free evaluations. When you're ready to keep going, pick the plan that fits your role.
Individual
For a single evaluator on their own device.
Billed annually per user
- Unlimited evaluations
- All supported frameworks, including the CSTP
- iOS & macOS access
- 3 free evaluations to start
School-wide
For a school with multiple evaluators.
3+ evaluators
- Everything in Individual
- 10% volume discount
- Unique access code issued to your school
- Easy distribution to your evaluators
District-wide
For districts deploying across every evaluator.
Best value for full deployments
- Everything in School-wide
- 20% volume discount
- Single access code for the entire district
- Direct support contact for rollout
All pricing shown is introductory and may change. For school and district plans, EvalScribe issues a unique access code that the buyer distributes to their evaluators.
The CSTP & EvalScribe — common questions.
Does EvalScribe support the full 2024 CSTP?
Yes — all six standards and all twenty-eight elements are built in natively, each with the CSTP's own language across the five levels, the look-fors, and the distinctions that separate adjacent ratings. EvalScribe maps your evidence to the right elements and drafts ratings and comments in the standards' voice.
Is the CSTP the same thing as my district's formal evaluation rubric?
Not necessarily. The CSTP is the state's professional standards continuum, developed by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and CDE. Formal evaluations under the Stull Act (Cal. Ed. Code §44660–44665) are governed by locally negotiated district rubrics — many are built directly on the CSTP continuum, while others adapt CSTP and Danielson into a different local scale. EvalScribe is built around the state's own CSTP continuum; email [email protected] if your district's instrument differs.
What does Applying mean if it's not the top level?
Applying is the CSTP's expected professional standard — the level the standards are designed for a competent, effective teacher to consistently reach. Integrating and Innovating describe practice that goes further: more fluid and responsive, and eventually leadership-level and profession-advancing. The CSTP frames all five levels as a Developmental Continuum, not a pass/fail scale, so Applying is a strong, appropriate place for most experienced teachers to sit.
What does Innovating actually require?
Leadership-level practice. Across the CSTP's elements, Innovating consistently describes teachers who advance the practice for others — modeling, leading, or transforming approaches across the classroom, school, or profession — not simply excellent individual teaching. Excellent, consistent classroom practice is Applying or Integrating; Innovating adds influence beyond the individual classroom.
Does EvalScribe support the induction program and Individual Learning Plan?
EvalScribe drafts evidence-based CSTP write-ups from your observation notes, which many mentors and beginning teachers find useful groundwork for induction reflection. The Individual Learning Plan itself, and the induction program's self-assessment process, are between the teacher and their mentor under their induction program's requirements — EvalScribe doesn't replace that relationship.
Does EvalScribe handle the Stull Act's evaluation frequency requirements?
EvalScribe handles the write-up, not the schedule. Under the Stull Act, certificated employees are evaluated at least once each school year during probationary status, at least every other year with permanent status, and (in some cases) every five years for veteran permanent staff who meet specific criteria. You and your district manage that schedule; EvalScribe drafts the documentation each time you observe.
Does EvalScribe replace evaluator judgment?
No. EvalScribe drafts evidence-mapped evaluations and suggested ratings. The evaluator reviews, edits, and finalizes every document. The professional judgment is always yours — EvalScribe just removes the typing.
What about pupil-progress measures required under the Stull Act?
The Stull Act also requires that evaluations reasonably relate to pupil progress toward state and district academic standards. EvalScribe drafts the classroom-observation portion of your evaluation against the CSTP; how your district incorporates pupil-progress measures into the overall evaluation is a separate, locally determined process.
Can the generated evaluations be edited?
Yes, fully. Every comment, every rating, and every piece of mapped evidence inside a draft evaluation can be edited before you export the final PDF. You are always the last set of eyes on the document.
Is observation data stored?
Your notes are processed transiently on Microsoft Azure and are not retained on EvalScribe's servers. Your evaluation records sit locally on your device under a local-first architecture. Your data is never used to train public AI models. For more detail, see our Privacy Policy.
How is EvalScribe different from ChatGPT or Claude?
Generic AI tools have no built-in understanding of the CSTP. They invent elements that don't exist, misread the developmental continuum, hand out Innovating freely, and produce vague comments that miss the level distinctions the standards require. EvalScribe is built around the CSTP's actual structure and five-level continuum — and the evaluator workflow that surrounds it — from capture through final export.
Where can I read the official CSTP sources?
The primary source is the Commission on Teacher Credentialing's 2024 California Standards for the Teaching Profession document. The statutory basis for formal teacher evaluation is the Stull Act, Cal. Ed. Code §44660–44665.
Which other state frameworks are supported?
EvalScribe ships with frameworks from all 50 states and Washington D.C., plus general models such as Danielson, Marzano, Stronge, CEL 5D+, NIET, and Kim Marshall. The complete list is available at evalscribe.com/frameworks.
Don't see your question? Reach out via our contact page — we read every message personally.
Spend less time on paperwork.
Lead your building.
EvalScribe was built to help California evaluators spend less time documenting evaluations and more time doing what matters: leading instruction, coaching teachers, and walking buildings.
Three evaluations free — no credit card · Available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac