Key participants in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, Dr. Catherine McClellan, Charlotte Danielson, and Mark Atkinson, have released the inaugural Practitioner Series for Teacher Evaluation report Teacher Evaluator Training and Certification: Lessons Learned from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project. The report, based on the experts’ collaborative work on video-taping and scoring over 23,000 lessons across 3,000 classrooms for the MET project, is designed to offer state and district leaders practical insights, especially best practices of evaluator training, an often overlooked component of cutting-edge teacher effectiveness systems.
The report makes a series of recommendations for evaluator training, including:
- The best training for evaluators is authentic scoring practice. Principals and other evaluators need the opportunity to score real lessons, in real time, and get immediate feedback;
- Any training program must include exemplar videos of classroom sessions that have been pre-scored by instruction experts;
- Evaluator training must focus on both accuracy and consistency. Accuracy and consistency are not synonymous – multiple observers can agree on a teacher’s performance, yet they can all be wrong;
- Training for observers must prepare them to understand the difference between bias, interpretation, and evidence; and
- Principals must be trained on both high-end and low-end teacher performance.
The full report is available here.
