Measuring teacher effectiveness

"Working with Teachers to Develop Fair and Reliable Measures of Effective Teaching" summarizes a huge study now in process, in which:

To help identify the best mix of teacher effectiveness measures, more than 3,000 teacher volunteers are participating in the MET project across six predominantly urban school districts: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Dallas Independent School District, Denver Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools, Memphis City Schools, and the New York City Department of Education. Participants teach math and English language arts (ELA) in grades 4–8, Algebra I, grade 9 English, and high school biology. All MET project teachers have agreed to have the following data collected and analyzed:

• students’ performance on standardized state and supplemental assessments
• video-based classroom observation (four lessons per teacher per year) and teachers’ reflections on these lessons
• teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge—an assessment of a teacher’s ability to recognize and diagnose students’ misunderstandings of the lessons
• students’ perceptions of the instructional environment in the classroom
• teachers’ perceptions of the working conditions and instructional support at their schools

As the study moves forward, there will be waves of new data on how each of the other factors connects to the core issue of student performance.  Future evaluation systems can then give teachers feedback on their use of the practices that work and more helpful ideas about how they can increase their effectiveness.

The MET study is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and moving on a fast track that calls for preliminary results of the first year's work to be released this fall and final results of the full study to be available by the winter of 2011-12.