Creating a Comprehensive System for Evaluating Teaching

Posted by on June 18, 2012

Toward a comprehensive system

A new report from Stanford University conceives of an integrated system that evaluates teachers and provides professional support along the teaching-career continuum, making assessments at key career milestones — pre-service, initial licensure, tenure, and professional licensure — uniformly across districts, providing support for supervision and professional learning, identifying teachers who need additional assistance or even a change of career, and recognizing expert teachers who can contribute to the learning of peers. The report distinguishes between teacher quality — personal traits, skills, and understandings — and teaching quality — strong instruction that enables a wide range of students to learn. The report views teaching quality as a function of teacher quality, but also as strongly influenced by the context of instruction. In addition to clear standards for student learning, accompanied by high-quality curriculum materials and assessments, a system should include five key elements: common statewide standards; performance assessments based on statewide standards; local evaluation systems aligned to the same standards; support structures to ensure trained evaluators, mentoring for teachers, and fair personnel action; and aligned professional learning opportunities. To transform systems, incentives should promote collaboration and knowledge-sharing over competition. Knowledge-sharing develops both learning organizations and a learning-oriented system, in which ongoing evaluation and inquiry into practice are stimulated within and across classrooms, across schools partnered within regions, and within the system as a whole.

See the report: http://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/591