How+do+we+decide+who+is+a+good+teacher?

One of the issues that education has to deal with is how to evaluate teacher competence. There is a lot of resistance to the process in various quarters, but you really cannot get better at doing things without getting feedback. This page is devoted to presentation and discussion of ideas from around the world on how to evaluate teachers, to figure out which ones are doing a good job and which ones aren't.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a U.S. organization that "works with schools, districts and states to provide excellent teachers to the students who need them most and advance policies and practices that ensure effective teaching in every classroom."

I've found a very interesting articleby Amanda Ripley that appeared in //The Atlantic// in 2010 and explores what the organization Teach for America has learned about what makes a good teacher. TfA hires new college graduates to teach in schools for poor and minority children in the US for two years each. TfA hires thousands of teachers a year and keeps detailed records of how each teacher's students do academically. TfA now has an enormous data base of evidence on the question that was brought together in the book //Teaching as Leadership//, by Steven Farr and his TfA colleagues. Here's one conclusion given in the Atlantic article:

//“In general, though, Teach for America’s staffers have discovered that past performance – especially the kind you can measure – is the best predictor of future performance. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers. And the two best metrics of previous success tend to be grade point average and “leadership achievement” – a record of running something and showing tangible results. If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size, that’s promising.”//

Harvard's study of the Long Term Impacts of Teachersis described in a paper by Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2011). (NBER Working Paper No. 17699) The study uses the "value added" approach to assessing teacher performance. That approach assesses the teacher's impact on her students' standardized test scores. Here's the first paragraph of the paper:

//"Many policy makers advocate increasing the quality of teaching, but there is considerable debate about the best way to measure and improve teacher quality. One prominent method is to evaluate teachers based on their impacts on their students.test scores, commonly termed the .value-added. (VA) approach (Hanushek 1971, Murnane 1975, Rocko¤ 2004, Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005, Aaronson, Barrow, and Sander 2007, Kane and Staiger 2008). School districts from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles have begun to publicize VA measures and use them to evaluate teachers. Advocates argue that selecting teachers on the basis of their VA can generate substantial gains// //in achievement (e.g., Gordon, Kane, and Staiger 2006, Hanushek 2009), while critics contend that VA measures are poor proxies for teacher quality and should play little if any role in evaluating teachers (e.g., Baker et al. 2010, Corcoran 2010)."//

Following the collapse of talks between the US Department of Education and teacher-preparation programs, Robert Pianta, Dean of of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, offers his perspective in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Short take: if you want to steer a canoe you have to be going faster than the current. In other words, teacher assessment programs are on their way, and if teacher preparation programs and teacher organizations want some influence on those programs they better start offering concrete suggestions.

The New America Foundation has a new working paper called //Watching Teachers Work//. The subtitle is Using Observation Tools to Promote Effective Teaching in the Early Years and Early Grades.

//"Identifying good teachers is a high priority in education reform, yet the debate rarely focuses on how education might improve if policies were based on teachers’ individual interactions with their students. This report argues for improving early education up through the third grade (PreK-3rd) by actually watching teachers in action using innovative observation tools in combination with evaluation and training programs."//

You can also find a video of a panel discussion about this report at the NAF site.

The District of Columbia (U.S.) school system has a new program for evaluating teacher performance. It's called IMPACT. //"Through IMPACT, DCPS seeks to create a culture in which all school-based personnel have a clear understanding of what defines excellence in their work, are provided with constructive and data-based feedback about their performance, and receive support to increase their effectiveness.// //"Among the innovations in the IMPACT system are the use of student achievement data and the use of master educators – subject-based expert teachers – to help assess and improve instructional performance.//

At the Carnegie Foundation, a project on //Assessing Teaching, Improving Learning//. Lots of what is on that site sounds like standard bureaucratic boilerplate but you might find something of interest there. Here's how they see their mission: //"The Assessing-Teaching-Improving-Learning (ATIL) program at the Carnegie Foundation seeks to enhance the capacity of those working in the field of teacher assessment and evaluation by helping them to learn from emerging practices in order to build more effective information systems to advance teacher quality."//

The OECD report, Evaluating and Rewarding the Quality of Teachers: International Practices, is available here.

A New York Times article from June 2011 about PAR - the Peer Assistance and Review program developed in Montgomery County, Maryland. Montgomery County's Peer Assistance and Review program