Over the past four decades, research has consistently confirmed what we have known intuitively all along—that no school-based factor matters more for a student’s learning than having an effective teacher.It’s ironic, then, that we give teachers so little useful feedback on the quality of instruction—the strengths they bring to the classroom and the gaps in their practice that need to be filled.
As part of our education strategy, we have made a commitment to learning from great teachers about what makes them great. To this end, we launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project last fall to explore ways to provide better feedback to teachers on their practice, so that schools can reward and retain those who are most effective, and create new professional development tools to help all teachers improve.
The project is led by independent researchers who will spend two years developing and rigorously validating new ways of identifying effective teaching. Two principles are guiding that work:
- In the grades and subjects where it is feasible to do so, any assessment of the quality of instruction should include student achievement growth as a major component.
- There should be multiple indicators of teacher effectiveness, such as classroom observations and student feedback, not just test-based measures of student achievement. These indicators must be demonstrated to be helpful in identifying classrooms with exemplary growth in student achievement.
Because we do not believe there is one single measure that can capture the range of skills which teachers need—the art and science of teaching—we are testing many different tools for their association with growth in student achievement...
A new white paper articulates the scope and methods...
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