AI-powered teacher evaluations
for Mississippi educators.
Cut evaluation documentation from hours to minutes. EvalScribe is built around Mississippi's Professional Growth System — the MDE Teacher Growth Rubric your district uses for every teacher observation, exactly as its four domains and nine standards intend.
Saved per evaluation
Built in natively
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.
PGS aligned
The MDE Teacher Growth Rubric built in natively — all four domains, nine standards, and the actual four-level rating scale.
Privacy-first
Transient processing on Microsoft Azure. Never used for AI training.
Built for workflow
Designed around the realities of being a Mississippi evaluator working through PGS formal observations and Professional Growth Scores.
Mississippi PGS, handled natively.
The Mississippi Educator and Administrator Professional Growth System (PGS) is the statewide framework every Mississippi public school district uses for teacher observation and evaluation. Administered by the MDE Office of Teaching and Leading and grounded in Danielson and Marzano research customized for Mississippi, the PGS Teacher Growth Rubric organizes practice into four domains and nine standards. EvalScribe is built around that structure exactly — same domains, same standards, same four-level rating scale — rather than approximating it with generic prose.
PGS — Professional Growth System (Teacher Growth Rubric)
The PGS Teacher Growth Rubric is Mississippi's current evolution of what many educators knew as M-STAR (Mississippi Statewide Teacher Appraisal Rubric). Organized into four domains and nine standards, each standard is rated on a four-level scale — Unsatisfactory, Emerging, Professional, Advanced — that drives the annual Professional Growth Score due to MDE by June 30 each year. Learning outcomes throughout the rubric are anchored to the Mississippi College- and Career-Ready Standards (MCCRS).
Mississippi PGS — quick facts
- Framework name
- Mississippi Educator and Administrator Professional Growth System (PGS); Teacher Growth Rubric for classroom teachers
- Governing body
- Mississippi Department of Education (MDE), Office of Teaching and Leading, Educator Effectiveness
- Adoption
- Mandatory statewide — used by every Mississippi public school district
- Predecessor
- M-STAR (Mississippi Statewide Teacher Appraisal Rubric)
- Foundation
- Grounded in Danielson and Marzano research, customized for Mississippi
- Structure
- 4 domains, 9 standards
- Rating scale
- 4 levels — Unsatisfactory, Emerging, Professional, Advanced
- Content alignment
- Mississippi College- and Career-Ready Standards (MCCRS)
- Observation cadence
- Minimum 1 formal observation annually (2 recommended); 30-minute minimum; post-observation conference required
- Annual submission
- Professional Growth Scores due to MDE no later than June 30
Four domains. Nine standards.
Lesson Design
2 standards- Std 1: Alignment & Sequence
- Std 2: High Levels of Learning
Student Understanding
2 standards- Std 3: Student Responsibility & Monitoring
- Std 4: Multiple Means of Understanding
Culture & Learning Environment
3 standards- Std 5: Learning-Focused Community
- Std 6: Space, Time & Resources
- Std 7: Respect for All Students
Professional Responsibilities
2 standards- Std 8: Professional Learning
- Std 9: Family/Guardian Communication
The four-level rating scale.
Unsatisfactory
Emerging
Professional
Advanced
How EvalScribe handles Mississippi PGS
All four PGS domains and all nine standards are built into the tool. The four-level rating scale (Unsatisfactory, Emerging, Professional, Advanced) is applied with rubric-aware logic that distinguishes between adjacent levels the way the MDE Teacher Growth Rubric actually intends — particularly the Professional-to-Advanced distinction, where the teacher's practice shifts from teacher-directed success (Level 3) to student-directed success (Level 4). Across nearly every standard in PGS, the difference between Professional and Advanced comes down to whether students are taking ownership: leading routines, seeking peer feedback, giving unsolicited encouragement, connecting learning to their own goals.
How EvalScribe works with PGS.
A five-step path from the back of the classroom to a finished, PGS-aligned evaluation ready for your Professional Growth Score.
Observe the classroom
Walkthrough or formal observation — 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 PGS
EvalScribe identifies which of the nine PGS standards each note supports across all four domains.
Suggested ratings & comments
Get draft performance-level ratings and professional feedback language in the voice of the PGS Teacher Growth Rubric.
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 PGS-aware drafting pipeline as scans and dictation.
Why generic AI falls short for PGS.
Pasting your observation notes into a general-purpose chatbot might produce a paragraph that sounds polished — but for PGS documentation, "sounds polished" isn't the bar. Defensible, rubric-aligned evaluations MDE expects for your Professional Growth Score are.
| Capability | Generic AI (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) | EvalScribe |
|---|---|---|
| Framework awareness | ✕No built-in understanding of Mississippi PGS or the Teacher Growth Rubric. Treats every prompt as a generic teaching evaluation. | ✓Built around PGS specifically — four domains, nine standards, four-level rating scale, all loaded. |
| Standard mapping | ✕Hallucinates PGS Standard numbers and invents rubric language that doesn't match the actual MDE Teacher Growth Rubric. | ✓Maps evidence to the actual nine PGS standards using the loaded rubric. |
| Rubric scoring | ✕Inconsistent ratings between teachers — and between sessions on the same teacher. | ✓Suggests PGS-appropriate Unsatisfactory / Emerging / Professional / Advanced ratings based on captured evidence. |
| Level distinctions | ✕Defaults to generic "good/great" framing that misses the Professional-to-Advanced distinction PGS actually requires — where student ownership becomes the deciding factor. | ✓Rubric-aware scoring that meaningfully distinguishes between teacher-directed success (Professional) and student-directed success (Advanced) in PGS's own terms. |
| 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 voice of the MDE Teacher Growth Rubric. |
| Evaluator workflow | ✕No concept of walkthroughs, formal observations, or pre/post conferences. | ✓Built around the actual evaluator workflow, from capture to final exported PDF. |
| 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 rubric language — a problem MDE specifically flags in its evaluator training. | ✓Every comment is tied to specific, observable evidence pulled from your notes and the PGS standard it supports. |
How much PGS 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 PGS 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 Mississippi PGS
- 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.
Mississippi PGS & EvalScribe — common questions.
Does EvalScribe support the Mississippi PGS Teacher Growth Rubric?
Yes — the PGS Teacher Growth Rubric is built in natively. All four domains, all nine standards, and the four-level rating scale (Unsatisfactory, Emerging, Professional, Advanced) are loaded into the tool. EvalScribe maps observation evidence to PGS standards and suggests rubric-aligned ratings and comments in the MDE rubric's own voice.
Where can I read the official Mississippi PGS framework and rubric?
The framework is maintained by the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) Office of Teaching and Leading. Primary sources:
MDE Educator and Administrator Professional Growth System (PGS)
MDE Teacher PGS page
Contact: MDE Office of Teaching and Leading, 601-359-2330.
Is PGS the same as M-STAR?
PGS is the current evolution of what many Mississippi educators knew as M-STAR (Mississippi Statewide Teacher Appraisal Rubric). M-STAR was Mississippi's earlier statewide teacher appraisal instrument; PGS is the successor system MDE now uses across the state. Some materials and older documents still reference M-STAR terminology. Structurally, the current PGS Teacher Growth Rubric organizes practice into four domains, nine standards, and a four-level rating scale.
Does EvalScribe replace evaluator judgment?
No. EvalScribe drafts evidence-mapped evaluations and suggested performance-level ratings. The evaluator reviews, edits, and finalizes every document. MDE requires evaluator certification through PGS training before conducting evaluations — the professional judgment stays with the certified evaluator. EvalScribe just removes the typing.
What's the difference between Professional (Level 3) and Advanced (Level 4) in PGS?
The Professional-to-Advanced distinction is the sharpest calibration call in Mississippi PGS. Professional (Level 3) is the expected standard — teacher-directed success where the teacher demonstrates effective instructional practices. Advanced (Level 4) requires student-directed success — students take ownership of learning and the environment. Across nearly every PGS standard, the Level 4 language specifies students leading routines, seeking peer feedback, giving unsolicited encouragement to peers, self-assessing against criteria, or connecting learning to their own personal goals. If the teacher is running the lesson well but the students aren't taking that ownership, the correct rating is Professional, not Advanced.
Can the generated PGS 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.
Does EvalScribe support informal walkthroughs as well as formal 30-minute observations?
Yes. Brief informal walkthroughs and the MDE-required formal 30-minute observations both flow through the same capture-and-draft pipeline. Documentation stays consistent across observation types throughout the annual evaluation cycle, which supports the evidence collection MDE expects for the year-end Professional Growth Score.
Does EvalScribe support the Administrator Growth Rubric or Counselor/Librarian rubrics?
EvalScribe is currently focused on the teacher observation and evaluation side — the PGS Teacher Growth Rubric. Mississippi's Administrator Growth Rubric (used for principal and assistant principal evaluations), Counselor Appraisal Rubric, and Librarian Evaluation Instrument are separate frameworks with their own structures. Support for administrator and specialist evaluation frameworks may be considered in future builds; this page is for the teacher rubric specifically.
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 PGS. They invent standard numbers that don't exist, score inconsistently, and produce vague comments that miss the Professional-to-Advanced distinction PGS actually requires. MDE's evaluator training specifically flags "good classroom management" and "students were engaged" as too vague to support ratings — evidence must reference specific, observable teacher behaviors and student responses. EvalScribe is built around the actual PGS structure and MDE's evidence standard.
Is EvalScribe available for iOS and macOS?
Yes. Individual evaluators can download EvalScribe from the Apple App Store on both iOS and macOS, with a free trial that includes three evaluations.
Can schools or districts purchase licenses for multiple evaluators?
Yes. School-wide licensing starts at three or more evaluators ($90/user/year), and district-wide licensing is $80/admin/year. When you order, EvalScribe issues a unique access code that you distribute to your evaluators — no separate provisioning required. Email [email protected] to get started.
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.
Page maintained by Anthony D. Neely, Ph.D. — practicing K–12 educator with nearly 20 years in the classroom, 2025–2026 Walker County Distinguished Teacher of the Year, and co-founder of EvalScribe. Framework details verified against current MDE source documents.
Page last reviewed: July 1, 2026
Spend less time on paperwork.
Lead your building.
EvalScribe was built to help Mississippi evaluators spend less time documenting PGS 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