More on Observing Teachers, PreK-12

In an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times yesterday, Susan Ochshorn and I argued for injecting some fresh ideas into the national education debates by looking at new approaches for observing and evaluating teachers.

Teacher wars are raging across the nation. One side blasts the “bad” teachers, waving around student test-score data and demanding accountability. On the other side are teachers: Defensive, closing the doors to their classrooms — and to the promise of improving their practice.

How do we halt the teacher-bashing, as President Obama urged in his State of the Union address, and still improve the quality of teaching? The answer is to radically change the evaluation conversation. A focus on watching teachers work — on how they actually interact with students — is long overdue.  [Read the full text here.]

The piece is a spin-off of our recent paper on how new observation tools can help to build a “common language” of good teaching across the birth-through-3^rd grade spectrum of education.  These research-based tools – unlike the typical “drive-by” observations that teachers may be accustomed to – are designed to provide valid and reliable data on how teachers teach.  People who work in Head Start may be most familiar with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), which has been used for professional development for several years and is now also used for evaluating a program’s quality.  But there are other tools as well. New ones are being developed for infant/toddler care. And several are making their way into use in elementary, middle and high schools. Five tools, for example, were chosen by the Gates Foundation for its Methods of Effective Teaching Project and described in a recent report.

Several of these observation tools have the potential to bring some coherence to two worlds that are often seen as separate – the world of early learning before kindergarten and the world of K-12.  That was one of the key themes of our event last week: Watching Teachers Work: Using Data from Observations to Improve Teaching.  The event,which was described on the Early Years blog on Ed Week and is now available as a video recording, opened up a wide-ranging conversation about what kinds of observations are most helpful to teachers, the extent to which professional development and formal evaluations should be linked, and how observation fits in the larger debates on revamping evaluation systems and using test-score data to judge teachers.

Elena Silva, senior policy analyst for Education Sector, facilitated a discussion with two teachers who have been observed by trained professionals. Their ideas and Silva’s K-12 perspective helped to focus discussion on many of the areas still to be untangled if observation data is to be used in evaluations. For example: What do you do in co-teaching situations, where one teacher is a special ed teacher and the other teacher is a subject-area teacher? Can school districts afford to employ coaches that observe and assist teachers while also paying for objective trained professionals to evaluate teachers for performance reviews? And where does student assessment or test-score data fit?

We are at the beginning of a journey to learn more, and we’re eager to hear from teachers, administrators and policymakers who have been grappling with similar questions. But in the meantime, we’re proud to be inserting some new voices into debates on education reform and “teacher effectiveness.” Andi Green, first-grade teacher at Stocks Elementary School in Tarboro, NC, was one of those voices (we included a clip from a Skype interview with her).  She said that the data from observations gave her “a huge amount of information” about what her teaching looked like. “When you’ve got the data looking you in the face, you’ve got to use it to grow,” Green said.