Education Week - March 6, 2013 - 25

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MARCH 6, 2013

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COMMENTARY
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EDUCATION WEEK

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Using Teacher Evaluation to Grow

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Shaping Systems to Promote Professional Learning
By Angela Minnici
& Ellen Behrstock-Sherratt

t was one of the best lines of the last
2012 presidential debate, even if it
wasn’t delivered by Barack Obama
or Mitt Romney. After much back and
forth on education policy and the importance of teachers, moderator Bob
Schieffer summed it up: “I think we all love
teachers.”
Policymakers and leaders from both sides
of the aisle may indeed love teachers, but a
major policy push in recent years is for morestringent performance evaluation for them.
Is teacher evaluation just the latest round of
hype in education reform? Or is there reason
to hope for something better?
There is general agreement in the education
community that teacher-evaluation reform is
needed, and most teachers support it if done
right. Teachers welcome the opportunity for
feedback, reflection, and professional conversation on their strengths and weaknesses and
better strategies for reaching all students.
Like all professionals, teachers want to
improve and succeed. They do not want to
work alongside incompetent or uncommitted colleagues, and they value fair, accurate,
and meaningful evaluation systems that can
help them improve and usher poor performers out of the profession. But if our appreciation of our teachers and our commitment
to education as a key to our country’s success are sincere, then we—as policymakers
or influencers, community leaders, and as a

society—need to do more than reform their
evaluation system.
Our work supporting state departments of
education through the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders—a national center led by the
American Institutes for Research and its partners, the Council of Chief State School Officers
and Public Impact, and funded by the U.S.
Department of Education—has convinced us
that a two-fold approach is needed. First, let’s
move the policy dialogue away from thinking
of teacher evaluation by itself. Instead, let’s
ask how evaluation can be used to deliver
the supports, strategies, and resources needed to develop all
teachers into their best,
most effective professional selves. Second, let’s connect
these evaluation
and professionalgrowth systems
to a larger
talent-management approach
featuring wellthought-through
supports that
states and districts
continually assess
and revise to keep a
pulse on teacher morale,
recruitment, development,
and retention.
Transitioning teacher-evaluation systems into teacher-professional-growth
systems that continually develop teach-

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ers’ skills and knowledge requires a culture
shift. It means replacing many traditional “sit
and get” models of one-shot workshops and
one-size-fits-all content presentations with jobembedded, collaborative professional-learning
systems aligned to the behaviors, skills, and
knowledge that define effective teaching.

“

Let’s move the policy
dialogue away from
thinking of teacher
evaluation by
itself.”

These systems
should also be
tailored to each
teacher’s experience level and
needs.
A new system
like this requires
states and districts
to think critically about
the policies, processes, and
personnel needed to promote
professional learning through teacherevaluation activities. Districts will likely
need to employ a variety of personnel

to deliver professional learning connected to
teacher-evaluation tools and targeted to individual teachers, teams, and entire faculties.
Instructional coaches, teacher-leaders, peer
teachers, and administrators all will play a
role in connecting professional learning to
teacher evaluation, which means they must
become fluent in the language of effective
teaching and help teachers use the feedback
they get to deepen their understanding of
successful practice and how to sharpen their
skills.
Districts and states also need to make
sure that the data from evaluation systems
are high-quality and skill-specific. That way,
these data can inform professional learning
for individuals, groups of teachers, and entire
districts. Districts need to provide educators
timely access to the right data and put formal
plans and structures in place to maximize use
of that information.
We see five fundamental steps—based on
research and promising practices—that disPAGE 26 >

ANGELA MINNICI directs the Center on Great
Teachers and Leaders, which supports states in their
efforts to provide effective teachers and leaders for all
students. She is a principal researcher at the American
Institutes for Research, based in Washington. ELLEN
BEHRSTOCK-SHERRATT led the development of
Everyone at the Table: Engaging Teachers in Evaluation
Reform, a project of the AIR and Public Agenda. She
provides technical assistance to states for the Center
on Great Teachers and Leaders and is a senior policy
and research associate at the AIR. She is the co-author
of two books on teacher quality.

iStockphoto.com/khalus

Tracing Technology’s
Unintended K-12
Consequences
By Matthew Lynch

he Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once famously
said, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” Though he was speaking about the road to
true equality for all people, I have often applied
this quote to the role of education in America,
particularly public education for K-12 students. Despite the
quickness with which our society has become accustomed to
having everything, all at once, education reform is still a slowturning gear in the great machine of time.
The truth is that the face of K-12 education is in a constant
state of change. Educators who have been in the field for several decades may notice that the pace at which changes in
methodology and student demographics occur today is much
faster than in the past. Many factors play into this phenomenon, but none as strongly as technological advancements. The
Internet, wireless devices, and improvements in communication all heighten the immediacy for information both within
and outside the classroom.

This is both a blessing and a curse, of course. It is really too
soon to tell if the first Internet-raised generations will fare
better or worse in life and succeed on a global scale. The assumption is that technology equals improvement, and I would
argue, overall, that is true. More access to information and
a shrinking world can only benefit students. The children
graduating from high school in the next decade will have a
broader view of the world than ever before, thanks to traditional geographic boundaries losing their hold in the areas of
communication, employment, and learning. I take no issue
with the actual technology. It is great. Where I see existing
and potential problems is in the indirect effects of technology
on the comprehension habits of our youngest learners.
You have to look at the overall influence of rapidly advancing technology to realize how it is also an obstacle to
K-12 classrooms. In its broadest sense, technology has totally transformed the way our children view life. A recent
study by Common Sense Media found that 72 percent of
children age 8 and younger have computer access at home.
Television use is almost universal, with 98 percent of children in this age group having at least one TV at home and
10 percent reporting that theirs is kept on all the time.
While television consumption by children is nothing new,
programs targeted toward toddlers and even infants are on
the rise. Consider the cable and satellite television venture
BabyFirstTV. The channel plays continuous programming
aimed at the very young. I bring this up not to spark a debate about whether this type of television viewing is helpful or hurtful to developing youngsters; I mention it as an
example of just how ingrained screen culture has become in
the lives of our kids.
The journal Pediatrics found that between birth and age
6, kids watch an hour and 20 minutes of television per day.
These measurements do not even address indirect exposure,

which puts the amount of time a television plays in the background at nearly four hours per day for kids ages 8 months
to 8 years. Love it or hate it, screen culture is a foundational
element of the contemporary American childhood.

“

You have to look at the overall influence

of rapidly advancing technology to realize how it
is also an obstacle to K-12 classrooms.”
As a result, our kids arrive at kindergarten with an advanced idea of instant gratification. They know that any
game, program, or form of communication is available at
the touch of a button. This easy access to everything translates to the way these children are programmed for learning, especially when moments of frustration arise. There
is not a quick fix for everything, but most children have
limited firsthand experience with waiting. It has always
been difficult to keep the attention of students, particularly
in the elementary set, but advancements like smartphones,
electronic tablets, and websites directed at young learners have complicated this truth even more. Teachers and
administrators today must find ways to keep students interested, but not completely abandon tried-and-true methodology. Thus, technology takes its toll on K-12 classrooms across
PAGE 27 >

MATTHEW LYNCH is the chairman of the department of elementary and
special education and an associate professor of education at Langston
University, in Langston, Okla. He worked for seven years as a K-12 teacher.
This spring, he will launch a blog called Educational Futures on edweek.org.

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Education Week - March 6, 2013

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