Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement

by Linda Darling-Hammond

Teacher evaluation systems are being overhauled by states and districts across the United States. And, while intentions are admirable, the result for many new systems is that good―often excellent―teachers are lost in the process. In the end, students are the losers. In her new book, Linda Darling-Hammond makes a compelling case for a research-based approach to teacher evaluation that supports collaborative models of teacher planning and learning. She outlines the most current research informing evaluation of teaching practice that incorporates evidence of what teachers do and what their students learn. In addition, she examines the harmful consequences of using any single student test as a basis for evaluating individual teachers. Finally, Darling-Hammond offers a vision of teacher evaluation as part of a teaching and learning system that supports continuous improvement, both for individual teachers and for the profession as a whole. This groundbreaking

Genres: Education, School, Teaching

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 2013

About the author

Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the Learning Policy Institute, is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University. She is the award-winning author of numerous books including Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning, and Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons from Exemplary Programs (Jossey-Bass).

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only other review of this book is a one star one that reads: Felt the book was poorly researched. Pandered to the educational far left.... As a teacher evaluation practitioner, I was disappointed.

Here is my educational far left, five star review...

One of the problems with teaching is that everyone has had lots of teachers in the past and so everyone ‘knows’ what needs to be done to evaluate their effectiveness. A good teacher knows their stuff, has good verbal communication skills, and produces lots of learning growth in their students. Test those three things, kick out the teachers who fail on any one of those three skills and you have fixed the teaching workforce. Easy.

The problem is that teaching isn’t quite what people think it is. That is, for most people their experience with teaching is the same as their experience with acting. They have been an audience member, and while there is nothing innately wrong with being a member of an audience, it isn’t quite enough to make you a great actor or to even really know what a great actor needs to have done to become great. And while you would be unlikely to ever become a great teacher without having been a student, being a student, in itself, doesn’t progress you nearly as far along that road as just about everyone thinks it does.

One of the misconceptions about teaching is that it is overwhelmingly an individual pursuit. And given, as classroom audience members, we have mostly only ever seen the performance of one teacher at a time, this is an easy mistake to make. But as this book makes clear, the best performing school systems are those that develop teachers as team players, rather than individual super-stars. They create spaces for teachers to constructively engage, develop, share ideas and support each other. That is, they create a learning environment for the teachers, a place where teachers help each other to diagnose their teaching and their students’ learning. Teaching often involves not only taming a thirty-headed beast, but also trying to get each of those heads engaged and interested in what you are hoping they might want to learn. It involves getting to know those heads enough to build trust and rapport. Because very often the people we learn the most from and not people teaching the subjects we already love, but rather people we love who are teaching subjects we become interested in because they are interested in them – and what interests them will maybe interest us too. How do you assess that?

To which the answer might well be, well, you can’t, but since everything else is so easy to assess, then maybe we should worry about assessing the easy stuff and leave the hard stuff to sort itself out. Why don’t we just measure student growth in attainment and no matter how the teacher got them there, that has to have been a good thing – right?

And that is why I’ve written this review – to quote a bit of this book that helps to complicate that assumption. About half way through we are told the story of a maths teacher called Carolyn Abbott. She taught 7th and 8th grade students and was insanely successful. So much so that one student said, ‘I have been looking forward to having math class with Ms. Abbot since fourth grade.’ On the state test she got her 7th grade students to the 98th percentile on the state exam. Which is what ended her career in teaching. You see, her performance was evaluated on calculating the ‘value add’ she could provide to her students. But if you bring your 7th grade students to the 98th percentile, you haven’t left yourself a lot of room for ‘growth’. Her 8th grade students did really well on the state test too, whereas, Carolyn scored ‘at the very bottom of the ranking system, which compares teachers to one another in terms of their students’ test score gains.’ The result? She left teaching to do a PhD in mathematics.

Now, you might think this is an isolated example and so just one of the inevitable, if unfortunate, quirks of an otherwise useful system. The problem is that how well a teacher does in one year according to their student test scores is insanely unreliable way to work out how they are likely to do the next year. To quote yet again: ‘A teacher who scored an A (in the top quintile) in one year had about a 50% chance of scoring a C, D, or F the next year’. And part of the problem is that teachers know that if they teach nice, middle-class kids (even when the stats have been ‘adjusted’ to take student characteristics into account) they are likely to do better on these assessments than they will if they teach other kids. And the same holds for certain grade levels. As one teacher is quoted as saying, ‘I’m scared to teach in the fourth grade. I’m scared I might lose my job if I teach in an [ELL] transition grade level, because I’m scared my scores are going to drop, and I’m going to get fired because there’s probably going to be no growth.’

So, rather than the best teachers taking on the hardest roles to impact student attainment, the system encourages the exact opposite. It also encourages teachers to avoid teamwork, if your bonus is premised on you ‘outperforming’ your peers, you are better off not having ‘peers’.

Fortunately, the book explains the kinds of evaluation programs that do work – that encourage collegiality, teacher learning and effectiveness. Often these involve evaluations that require teachers to present a portfolio of their teaching and multiple modes of assessments that show how they have adjusted their teaching after reflecting on student learning. Being a reflective practitioner is a pretty obvious way to ensure teachers continue to grow in the job – evaluation strategies that encourage that seem pretty useful.

There is lots more to this book – and it is simply written, clear and well worth reading. The problem with books like this, though, is that it is too easy to assume that they are written for teachers and teachers alone – whereas, given that all of us play a role in allowing teacher assessment strategies to be implemented through government policy – based often on our own ‘gut feelings’ – it might help if we knew that some of the things that seem intuitively obvious as the best ways to fix things, might have exactly the opposite effect.

[Hasagi]

Good idea

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

Felt the book was poorly researched. Pandered to the educational far left.... As a teacher evaluation practitioner, I was disappointed.

[Jill Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Valuable for all, but especially worthy for administrators.