Measures of Effective Teaching

Evidence shows clearly what most people know intuitively: teachers matter more to student learning than anything else inside a school. Yet the design of our school systems fails to value and support effective teaching, improve overall teacher effectiveness, or recognize and reward those who take on and excel at the most difficult teaching assignments. Teachers often bear the brunt of the failure to recognize effective teaching. We do little to study and share the best teachers’ practices or recognize them for their contributions.

An important step toward supporting teachers and ensuring that all students have access to high quality instruction is to develop fairer and more useful measures of teacher effectiveness. This is the goal of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which will support independent education researchers–in partnership with school districts, principals, teachers, and unions–to develop objective and reliable measures of effective teaching. Rather than relying solely on how well a teacher’s students do on assessments, the MET project seeks to uncover and develop a set of measures that work together to form a more complete indicator of a teacher’s impact on student achievement.

In addition, as part of its plan to promote and support effective teaching, the foundation is investing in four communities across the country to support bold and ambitious plans that will transform how teachers are recruited, developed, rewarded, and retained.

The MET project will enroll 3,700 teachers, including in the following sites:

Charlotte-Mecklenburg (N.C.) Public Schools
Denver Public Schools
Hillsborough County (Fla.) Public Schools
Memphis (Tenn.) City Schools
New York City Public Schools
Pittsburgh Public Schools

Participation in the Measures of Effective Teaching project is entirely voluntary. School districts applied to participate and were selected for the project based on criteria that included the level of support of district leaders, principals, teachers and unions. Both participating teachers and the schools will each receive $1,500 stipends as honoraria.

Funded by a $45 million commitment from the foundation, the project will be implemented over the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years in: Math and English classes in grades four through eight; Algebra I at the high school level; high school Biology (or its equivalent); and English in grade nine. Year one will focus on teacher recruitment and data collection, while Year Two will focus on validating promising measures. While the findings and tools developed through this project will be made available to the public, none of the individual teacher-level data will be shared with the public or with school or district personnel.

Researchers will collect seven types of data:

Student feedback through surveys
Student work
Supplemental student assessments
Videotaped classroom lessons
Teacher reflections on their videotaped lessons
Assessment of teachers’ ability to recognize and diagnose student problems
Teacher surveys on working conditions

There is no widely agreed upon measure for teacher effectiveness that exists today, and that is precisely why we are undertaking this work. The results of this project and what we learn will help districts across the country identify effective teaching in order to improve student achievement and help teachers ensure excellence in their profession.