Posts filed under ‘Teacher Effectiveness’
Teacher Prep Needs to Lead – Not Follow
Higher education must attract talented students and prepare them for careers in their chosen fields. However, an equally important aspect of their core mission must be the genesis of new ideas and leadership in innovation. I am all for quality assurance among educators, but the current dialogue around regulation of teacher prep is the stuff of lowered expectations. How can we insist on incentives to look backward when incubation of solutions for the future is what will drive their real value-added?
Recently, I spent some time at the DesignEd Symposium learning about collaboration among Boston-area design schools. It was fascinating to explore issues of creativity, innovation, and excellence with a group of educators, students, and industry leaders. The usual issues of cost, attrition, and performance after graduation – universal themes – arose in the conversations. However, the one big takeaway for me was the need for universities to drive the process of innovation, not just deliver graduates who are career-ready. This is an important component of the mission of higher education that seems to be under-appreciated in discussions about teacher prep and quality assurance.
The Department of Education has been developing guidelines for teacher prep programs that promote quality through accountability for the performance of their graduates on the job. I remain among the skeptics when it comes to holding institutions accountable for people over whom they no longer have any direct line of authority. Beyond that, we are working with the presumption that left unregulated, the teacher prep programs will deliver substandard graduates…more lowered expectations. As if this were not enough, we add insult to injury with proposals that would leave them hamstrung by the process of constantly assessing past trainees rather than investing their resources in the future of teacher leadership.
Absent regulation, schools of education and their school district partners have long histories of collaborations. Pre-practicum experiences and student teaching allow candidates to develop relationships with future employers who will observe their performances first hand. New teacher portfolios, references, and classroom auditions offer insight for employers. There is ample opportunity for communication and feedback between teacher prep programs and school systems who hire their graduates. Neither party wants new teachers to fail. Further, creative tension between current performance and future innovations is a good thing. A visionary teacher prep program needs to be improving constantly, not waiting for instructions from their clients.
Budget limitations have created zero-sum games for most players in education. In the short-run, there will be a real loss in innovation in direct proportion to the size of the burden of teacher prep regulations. However, the long-term impact of failure to drive the industry forward will far outweigh any short-term reduction in uncertainty about the quality of new hires.
The Teacher Prep Debate – Of Double Standards and Managerial Dodge Ball
Teacher prep programs cannot be forced to maintain a longitudinal tracking system on the career progress of their alums. Such a system would violate the privacy of the individuals who were monitored, answer only genuinely academic questions – not timely solutions to problems, and crowd out more prudent investments in higher education for teachers. In the meantime, districts would be allowed to dodge accountability for talent management while sitting in the real locus of control. All the while, a revolving door of TFA darlings would bypass scrutiny as they churned through the schools with guaranteed turnover. In the end, the only real change in the picture would be a serious fracture in the long history of collaboration between teacher prep programs and school districts – one of the greatest assets we might have leveraged.
Teacher prep programs are being targeted for accountability in teacher quality. Under consideration is a Federal plan to have schools of education track their graduates for up to ten years after program completion. The goal is to sort the good from the bad and hold the prep programs accountable for any shortcomings in future teacher performance. The hair on the back of my neck is raised as I consider the Bill of Rights, school district responsibility for talent management, and the perennial boot camp teacher prep experiments. School districts and teacher prep programs have a long history of collaboration. Why kill this strength by pitting the two against one another?
Employers are responsible for hiring the best people for every job, supervising and motivating them effectively, and assessing their continuing value to the endeavor. Employees enter an organization honestly and with appropriate preparation. They share responsibility for keeping themselves whole on the job. Continuous growth and professional development must be valued on both sides of the contract. When these conditions are not met, employers and employees have a problem to solve. External parties may be asked to facilitate the process, but nowhere do labor standards call for privacy invasion or deflection of responsibility onto unrelated parties.
Teacher prep programs are supposed to get their students ready as teachers. School districts hire those people, and the locus of control over the situation is transferred. The education schools are essentially off duty with regard to specific students. In fact, just as the districts must have permission from prospective new teachers to seek information from their prep programs, the prep programs have no right to seek and track employment data about anyone except their own employees. They have no right to invade the privacy of their alums. Nor do they have any control over the conditions of employment that exist after students leave their programs.
Employment is always a “buyer beware” situation. If districts suspect they have hired teachers who are inadequately prepared for the job, they are protected by probationary employment contracts. Experienced leaders must assess the situation and, in consultation with the new hire, make a plan to remediate and reassess. A trend in bad hires from particular teacher prep programs is instructive much more rapidly than a gratuitous multi-year tracking system. In addition, prep programs may well have addressed constructive feedback from districts and improved their outcomes before the negative data stream has been aggregated, analyzed and reported.
And what about alternative pathways to credentialing of new teachers? I happen to believe many of these programs bring good teachers into the education field, but they benefit from a double standard in any regulation of quality. Teach for America (TFA) only asks for a two-year commitment, by which time novice teachers are considered barely adequate practitioners. Yet we only hear good news about their contributions and worry about losing them to what is prescribed turnover, not issues of quality.
Schools of education and school districts may continue to leverage their relationships to improve teacher prep as well as sustaining educator vitality on the job. However, their primary roles should not become blended, nor should their respective accountabilities be diffused.
Tarnished Seals of Approval
There is gold in the teacher quality debate, just not for the children. Quality assurance programs are lining up for funding in exchange for promises to track teachers from their prep programs through the next several generations of their progeny. However, there seems to be a charlatan factor that has already gotten under the radar.
A year or so ago, I discovered that my principal certification was not transferable to a new state because the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University was not a quality leadership program for educators. Okay, so the echo chamber of education does not recognize the validity of general management training. Looking further, however, the School of Education at Northwestern did not make the list, nor did the Curry School of Education from my undergraduate school, the University of Virginia. In fact, I discovered that my best chance for adequate credentialing would be enrollment in one of a plethora of storefront correspondence schools scattered across Long Island and the Bronx. They had met the requirements for the national seal of approval.
It seems to be the case that only a handful of major university education programs have applied for accreditation in the new teacher quality programs. And the reason may be that they don’t have to…their work stands on its own merit. Why would they undergo yet another tedious review procedure to prove to the narrow field of education that their world-class standing is, indeed, deserved?
School districts know the sources for strong teacher preparation. They are more likely to have trouble hiring and retaining new teachers from high quality programs because of LIFO and seniority issues, the limitations of career advancement, or the pension trap. Further, teachers who offer promise but deliver less success over time may reflect their employment environments more so than their original training.
I believe in continuous quality assurance. I cannot endorse expending serious resources to raise the barriers to entry in a field that lacks commitment thus far to annual goal setting and performance reviews once access to the field has been achieved.
PS, What are the chances that you are getting some of your best insights from alums of one of the perennial boot camp teacher prep programs that bypassed most tradition quality hurdles?
Show Me the Reports
Step 1 in any merit-based compensation program is training around the definition of merit. A template for performance measures and evaluation thereof is shown to the people who will be subject to them. Then the forms are filled out and discussion ensues. At some later date, these criteria are used for actual merit pay. Trust comes from knowing the people and the tool. It is not the basis for signoff on a system to be designed later.
With all the talk about teacher effectiveness and compensation, there must be hundreds of teacher effectiveness reports out there, right? Of course, they are based on well-developed records of student outcomes…which don’t really exist yet either, do they? Please tell me I’m wrong. Show me the reports.
Children learn with outward results; however, they also internalize many things that will manifest themselves later. We will never know all that we have taught them, the good, the bad, or the rest. That is why we look at teacher effectiveness with an eye to process and outcomes. Accordingly, multiple measures have been tossed around with regard to teacher performance. Now it is time for the report designers to just put the templates out there and validate them.
Similarly, children take tests to show what they have learned, their ability to analyze and solve problems. Children also demonstrate their habits of learning, their creativity and industriousness, and their civic mindedness. All will contribute to a foundation for lifelong learning. Additional measures that document intellectual and psychosocial development track their successful growth toward adulthood as well as highlighting need for intervention. Schools have built databases that cover some of these elements, but the models are not robust enough to be fully instructive or actionable. Still, it is time to print them and share them.
Absent good data, the debate over student outcomes and teacher effectiveness is being held in moot court. It is time for demonstration projects to reveal themselves and share what they have got, warts and all. Be prepared for flak, but don’t be surprised if you get more than a bit of praise from real reformers. We all need something tangible to turn this discussion into a problem with a solution.
Prior posts…on teacher effectiveness…on basic student data…on psychosocial development
Promote Teacher Quality with Career Mobility – Not More Regulation
Professionals often get their first jobs because of their educational backgrounds; they keep getting jobs because of where they have worked and what they have done. They enter each job well-prepared and committed to keeping themselves current, energized, and growing. Obstacles are hurdles to be overcome; problems are opportunities for leadership and accountability. These are NOT the values of regulation; they are the values of entrepreneurship.
Historical patterns of regulation in K-12 education tended to erect barriers to entry in lieu of professional quality assurance. Teachers and administrators have had to complete required coursework and apprenticeships as well as passing exams or other assessments to achieve licensure. They then entered the profession, often remaining in the same school district for the duration of their careers. Periodic recertification required professional development and, in some cases, additional formal education. However, by that time, most had achieved tenure. They were IN the system, and every financial incentive from paycheck to pension created barriers to exit.
The US Department of Education has determined that this regulated approach to teacher quality has failed. What we need is…drum roll, please…regulation to make the barriers to entry higher. Huh? Yes, let’s make it harder for those closest to the energized newbie end of the spectrum, new teachers-in-training, to get the job. Not sure how this addresses the problems of hiring and retention in urban education, but it clearly does something that even the toughest blame-game champions have never been able to accomplish: assign accountability for failures within the public education system to people who have not yet participated. Way to keep the peace guys!
I am truly disappointed. This is not Change I Can Believe In. This is further abdication of leadership. We have an opportunity to inject entrepreneurship into the system, challenge bureaucratic procedures, and reset the way we motivate leaders in the classroom and in the front office. Let’s rethink this thing. And not with the institutional myopia of a group of insiders whose vision comes from the wrong end of the telescope. It’s time to let people in education come and go as they please, and to bring a more cosmopolitan approach to problem-solving. I’m talking removal of the barriers to exit.
Suppose teachers and administrators had freedom to move about the education system, seeking new experiences, sharing expertise, and disseminating best practices…without severe financial penalties. Suppose a great teacher wanted to go for an MBA instead of an MA in school leadership…to bring new management tools back to the system. Suppose an empathetic school leader wanted a burned-out educator to get to a better place…without losing the ranch.
Educator quality arises from openness to change, which, when managed correctly, translates into professional growth. It is predicated on trust, fair evaluation of performance, and safe harbor while taking calculated risks and exploring creativity. It is stifled by rigid regulations, inflexible pay and benefits, and scapegoating behavior. We will not build a better education system with a slow trickle of teachers from more tightly regulated teacher prep programs. We have a lot of great teachers. We need to set them free.
Student Surveys Predict Outcomes
Melinda Gates reported to EducationNation yesterday that students can tell who is a good teacher. Gates Foundation research found that students who felt they had a good teacher demonstrated better outcomes than students who perceived they had weaker instruction. More on this, please.
A high correlation between positive student outcomes and positive student perceptions on the ability of their teachers seems like good news. Now I am anxiously awaiting the next round of related research. In the meantime, I cannot resist the urge to explore some possible reasons for this phenomenon. I wonder if…
- Children who receive effective instruction recognize it and appreciate it, especially when they take a test and realize they have been prepared well.
- Classically strong teachers and motivated students are more likely to be matched within the education system. Less responsive students are turfed to marginalized programs staffed by rookies and other less-empowered educators. The latter case does not enhance engagement, performance, or satisfaction with instruction.
- Kids who like their teachers are more likely to engage in learning.
- Good teachers attend to the whole child, including discussions with them related to their intellectual and psychosocial development. This enables the children to be more self-aware and to recognize adults who have helped them grow. Alternately, students without such support are more likely to perform at a lower level and assign blame for failure on others, including their teachers.
- Children want to learn, and the adults who listen to them and work with them make better teachers.
- Nothing succeeds like success. Each test is a cumulative evaluation of the system. Those who have done well historically will enter new classes ready to learn and do well; those who have lagged in the past will not assimilate well in the future or perform well on assessments. The best teachers combine the ability to sustain growth in some while breaking failure cycles with others.
Thank you, Ms. Gates. So what did the kids say?
First Glance at Teacher Effectiveness Data
How can a boss create a climate of continuous quality improvement for a collection of individual contributors whose motives are so sincere and whose commitment is so complete as to be deemed beyond reproach? Surely, no one could consider student achievement gaps to reflect their practices.
Each year, teachers are hired, provided job descriptions and terms of engagement, and assigned course loads and student rosters. Textbooks, curricular objectives, and pacing guides may be available. Orientation sets expectations for the culture, academic goals, policy, and procedures of the school. Day one ends and the business of educating students begins.
Facing one’s job as a teacher can be daunting. A complex mix of lonely autonomy, resource constraints, and unpredictable challenges must be met with courage, resilience, and flexibility. Often, time is the scarcest commodity, and the start of a new school year marks the end of personal leisure time and lifestyle choices. Students come first, and teaching them must be its own reward. This would seem like an administrator’s dream – highly motivated people wanting to do what is best for children. However, it is that same independent spirit and devotion that creates conflict in teacher evaluations.
How can a boss create a climate of continuous quality improvement for a collection of individual contributors whose motives are so sincere and whose commitment is so complete as to be deemed beyond reproach? Some ground rules are needed…
- Level the playing field for all teachers. No good guy/bad guy dichotomy. Teachers resist even minor constructive criticism in a culture marked by exemplars and losers.
- Create teacher effectiveness reports and share and validate the data before implementation.
- Balance the subjective content with generous quantities of objective data that link accountability to parameters under each teacher’s control.
- Be sure to include any behavior that is valued in the tool. Attendance may not be the most highly valued attribute, but if you presume it, you will lose it.
- Limit the impact of data gathering for teacher effectiveness reports with automation, student participation, and integration into existing routines.
So, how do you evaluate teacher effectiveness? How well that teacher does his or her job must be assessed using a variety of data sources to answer a range of questions. Some are as simple as what were the most basic terms of engagement, and were they met? Or, did you hire a “whole” teacher or one who has qualifiers concerning readiness to teach? Did the teacher fulfill contingencies for continued employment, make reasonable progress toward continued preparation? What are the values of the school? Did the teacher support the culture in a positive way? For example, did the teacher collaborate effectively, resolve conflicts well, support collegiality?
What was the outcome for the students? Were students engaged in education? Did students complete the course successfully? Were they satisfied with the teacher/instruction? What did their portfolios show about their instruction and assessment? How well did they perform on formal assessments? How did their parents respond to their educational experience? Too many questions, but I would rather design a tool around too many than too few.
1st Draft of Teacher Effectiveness Framework
|
Question |
Data Source |
Data Use |
| Is the teacher meeting basic terms of employment? | HR record | Attendance, participation in professional development, professional conduct |
| Is the teacher highly qualified? | HR Profile | Credentials, progress on plans |
| Is the teacher meeting curricular expectations? | Teacher planning documents | Evidence of unit plans, robust lesson prep with differentiation |
| Student notebooks | Evidence of course content | |
| School-wide curriculum tracking system | Adherence to pacing guides, content standards | |
| Is the teacher maintaining a safe and effective classroom environment? | Continual classroom walk-throughs, casual observation | Visible evidence of student-centered design, organizational support, student engagement, and visual content reinforcement |
| Record of interventions | Discipline issues, pro-active problem-solving | |
| Are the students successful? | Attendance record | Attendance rates, patterns |
| Local assessments | Scores on assignments, informal tests, formal assessments | |
| Student portfolios | Samples of student work, student record of academic and psychosocial accomplishments, peer review | |
| Student report cards | Pass rates, grade distribution | |
| Student follow-up records | Advanced placement, graduation rates | |
| Student’s actual and predicted scores on standardized tests | Teacher value-added to test scores | |
| Parent surveys | Parent satisfaction with instruction, classroom environment | |
| Can the teacher deliver a strong composite snapshot of his or her practice? | Classroom observation | Teacher’s practice in action |
| Peri-observation data bank | Documentation of practice in terms of curricular goals, lesson prep, student record and work samples, teacher’s standard records and personal progress data | |
| Pre and post-observation conference | Teacher’s reflectiveness, response to feedback | |
| Does the teacher support the school’s culture and values? | Teacher peer review | Evidence of collaboration, vertical course alignment, professional conflict resolution |
| Professional development portfolio | Contribution to school culture and value system, participation in organizational growth goals, personal growth record |
This is just a starting point for discussion. Many issues remain for customized format, such as…
- How well developed was the assignment in terms of deliverables? How creatively was the gap between defined and discretionary deliverables closed? Was the program academically rigorous?
- Was there unusual challenge in the course load and roster? Is there hardship duty to be assessed?
- Were there added dimensions of special needs or English language proficiency? Did this involve co-teaching or unique curricular requirements?
Comments welcomed.
